“Your island seems to be washing away into the sea”

Plantation growth, environmental dislocation and decline of peasant agriculture in colonial Ceylon

by Eric P. Meyer

 

At a time of distress when cyclone has resulted in dramatic floods and landslides and when controversies about the causes and responsibilities for the disaster are swelling, it is worth recalling that environmental dislocation in Sri Lanka must be traced back to the development of plantations in the Kandyan regions in the 19th and early 20th centuries, and that the adverse impact of plantation development on peasant agriculture and the lack of conservancy policies had been denounced by reports after reports, but with no avail.[1]

 

In 1931, a report on soil erosion in Ceylon quoted the words of the director of Kew Gardens, the British botanist A.W. Hill: “Your island seems to be washing away into the sea”.[2]

 

Such a statement was not new. The issue had been discussed by scientists since 1873 when, instructed by Thwaites, director of the Peradeniya gardens, the then director of Kew gardens, Hooker, wrote to the Colonial office “The mischief done in other colonies is especially to be guarded against in this case. The planting of tea and coffee has suddenly become an object of active and to some extent of almost a speculative enterprise (…) There is reason to fear that districts may have been hastily cleared of forest”. The Governor Gregory tried to put the blame on slash-and-burn (chena) cultivation, described as “the easiest and laziest cultivation”, without totally exonerating the planters. This led to the stoppage of land alienation by the Crown above 5,000 ft, but Thwaites in his Administration report of 1878 pointed out that silting and drying up of sources, attributable to the carelessness of the planters, continued.  Shortly later, the coffee enterprise collapsed due to leaf rust (hemileia vastatrix), to be replaced by tea plantations. In 1882, the new governor, Gordon, asked a member of the Indian Forest Service, D’A Vincent, to report on the forest administration of Ceylon[3]. This detailed report blamed the colonial administration for a total lack of interest for forest conservation and the inability to apply its own regulations, since the beginning of the coffee cultivation. A few years later, the sudden development of tea estates in the Kelani Valley resulted in the general silting of the Kelani river hitherto used for transport, which led to a project of railway, and this situation was the subject of three successive reports[4], which recommended to establish compulsory rules to control erosion by plantations, noted that navigation was for the first time interrupted on the Kelani river during the dry season and that it was the result of the opening of the tea plantations, while Forsythe, the representative of the planters, blamed chena cultivation (“a wasteful and pernicious system”) for most of the erosion and minimized the extent of paddy fields affected by silting. In 1909 experiments by Peradeniya to better control erosion were abandoned; and an Indian specialist of irrigation pointed out the impact of the cultivation practices of the planters “ill adapted to tropical conditions”. Another report by P.M. Lushington, of the Indian Forest Service[5] blamed the Ceylon system which gave little power to the Forest department, and after explaining that forests are necessary to regularize the flow from rainfall, concluded “no greater condemnation of the forest policy of Ceylon can be made than that which nature herself affords in the state of her principal rivers  (…) The protection of the rivers in Ceylon is no longer in the hands of the forest department but for the greater part in the hand of the planter (…) the whole point of protecting forests has been missed”.  None of the reports was followed by an energetic policy of forest and soil conservation, owing to the paramount power of the planting industry.

 

The soil erosion report of 1931 was extremely critical of the planters’ lack of awareness of the situation: “it is doubtful whether [the planters] see the necessity for looking beyond the present and working for the future. There is a distinct tendency in certain quarters to be satisfied with what has been done (…) and to regard with prejudice and impatience the view that further measures are required. A planter stated that Agents would not countenance the spending of large sums on measures of soil conservation. The tenure of the superintendent is short contrary to the proprietary planters of old (…) It was suggested to the committee that the policy of owners, agents and visiting agents was short-sighted and that it was necessary to persuade these authorities of the value of measures of soil conservation”. The report criticized the unchecked practice of clean weeding on steep tea plantations resulting in the uprooting of tea plants (what the workers called “spider”), silting of culverts and eventual abandonment of acres become unproductive. In rubber plantations, erosion was less apparent but very real and as the paddy fields and gardens were in close contact with them, the adverse impact was seriously felt. The extension of small rubber holdings by the conversion of paddy land was made without any regard to soil conservation, contrary to the practice of terraced paddy cultivation, which was ideal to preserve the ecology. In coconut areas, there was little erosion as the land was generally flat and covered with grass but the risk of flooding was serious. According to the commission, in every planting district of the island, except flat coconut areas, there were constant complaints of troubles to paddy cultivation due to erosion in uphill estates and subsequent silting of fields and irrigation channels. In particular areas, such as the Kotmale valley above Gampola, Spring valley in Uva, Aranayake valley in Kägalla, landslides regularly occurred as a result of indiscriminate clearings on steep slopes. Whole valleys were affected for a couple of cultivation seasons, and fields on the margins of the estates were abandoned for good. Irrigation channels (elas) were choked, their banks breached by gravel and stones coming straight from estate drains, and water flow to the fields was stopped. In the worst cases, as in the Kotmale valley, landslides engulfed whole tracts of paddy fields . The report minimized the responsibility of slash-and-burn (chena) cultivation, which was the usual culprit in the colonial discourse: “The chena system is undoubtedly responsible for a large amount of preventable erosion, but it is possible that the damage is not so great as often thought. The chena cultivator does not introduce drainage systems into his land, but on the other hand, he does not keep the surface of the soil so scrupulously clean as the estate planter and the very presence of weeds assists in preventing soil wash”. Peasant care in land management, and the preoccupation with preserving or increasing the diversity of resources available in the highlands, are indeed well documented[6].

 

The report was received with little interest in the Colonial Office in London, where the great issue at the time was the political reform proposed by the Donoughmore commission. On the other side, the destructive impact of the plantation system on peasant agriculture became a leitmotiv of the political discourse in Ceylon after 1930, during and after the great depression. For example, in 1934, S.A. Wickramasinghe, the first leftist elected at the State Council, declared in a speech: “There is wanton soil erosion taking place. I have myself seen a report which stated that 20,000 villagers [sic] had to leave a district because of this. That document is available in the Kandy kacceri. Some harrowing tales of decimation are reported by the Government Agent in his Administration report as a consequence of the opening up of estates”[7]. Shortly after independence, the Kandyan Peasantry Commission concluded that the plantation system was responsible for the ‘disintegration of the village’. This thesis was later challenged by economists who held that the plantation sector and the village sector functioned in watertight compartments with little interference, and by academic historians such as Michael Roberts who argued that the impact remained limited[8]. The accumulation of local evidence found in official reports and unprinted diaries of colonial officers suggest that the environmental impact was deep, concentrated and direct in specific areas where tea, rubber and coconut estates were close to the villages, and that it was indirectly felt in other areas as well. We review here a large collection of such cases taken from different areas before focusing on the Kägalla district.

 

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Deforestation leading to soil erosion and disruption of water systems was common during the coffee era (1830s to 1880s) in the upper valleys of the rivers of the Central and Uva provinces, especially in Kotmale, Uda Hewaheta and Udukinda. In the 1860s, the Government made timid attempts to arrest the process, by reserving wooden belts along the streams when selling lands to the planters, or even by repurchasing land for the purpose: “In the older grants made by Government, no reservation was made of land on either side of the water courses. Coffee growers who constantly purchased the higher lands took advantage of this to extend their plantations up to the edge of the water. The consequence has been in many cases the free flow of the water has been obstructed to the great prejudice of the paddy cultivators whose fields were irrigated by that water”. But the damage had already been done, and it continued because reservations were rarely delimited and planters quite often encroached on them without reaction from the authorities.[9] The Administration report of Nuwara Eliya for 1884 analyzed the situation in Pallegampaha korale of Uda Hewaheta: “There can be no doubt that the clearing of almost all the slopes at the head of this valley as coffee estates (Graymount being one of them) has seriously affected the water supply of the fields below (at Liyanwela), and disregard or at least ignorance of this probable result was shown when so much forest was sold to be opened as estates”. In Gangapalata korale (Udawatte) “the village lies on the northern slope of the Diyatalawa and I think that the opening of a great deal of the land high up on that hill as coffee estates must have permanently impaired the water supply of the streams. I do not see any other reason for the insufficiency of water to irrigate the fields formerly cultivated regularly”. The same situation prevailed in Walapane. In Kohoka korale paddy fields were abandoned following landslides “due undoubtedly to the total destruction of forests”. When coffee estates closed down in the 1880s, it was found possible to reopen abandoned irrigation works, such as the Werapitiya Maha ela in Pata Dumbara: “about 4 miles of a channel which had been blocked for years and which used to irrigate a very large area of land. The destruction of the latter work had been due to the silt from two coffee estates through which the ela passed and which had been sold by the Crown without a reservation along the ela, and it was only when the estates were finally abandoned that it was found possible to reopen the channel”[10]. In addition, at least during the coffee era, water powered factories often tapped the streams to the detriment of paddy fields owners, and the streams passing through estates were regularly polluted by coffee berry processing operations

 

 Whether deforestation modified the regime and amount of rainfall or not was and still is debated[11]. There were signs of a reduction of rainfall on the upper slopes of the up-country and of a less regular distribution of rainfall along the year in the plantation areas, due to reduced moisture of the atmosphere, but no incontestable proof can be adduced. P.M. Lushington, in his report on Ceylon forests published in 1921, held the following view: “Forests do not increase rainfall to any appreciable extent, but they serve to distribute the water supply and to prevent erosion. By cooling the atmosphere the forests assist in causing additional local rainfall, but the value in breaking the force of the wind, in preventing floods and landslides, and the silting of rivers, thus keeping them navigable, is far greater.” Revenue officers in the field were more assertive, for example in a report on the Nuwara Eliya district[12]: “There cannot be a shadow of doubt that the extensive forest clearings made in Walapane and Hewaheta as elsewhere within the last 40 years or so, have very materially and prejudicially affected the productiveness of the paddy lands in these divisions, both by reason of the decrease in the regular flow of water in the streams on which the fields used to depend, and also because of the diminution in the supply of fertilizing substances carried down in the low-lying lands from the adjacent forests during the rain.” Even if one discounts the hypothesis of rainfall reduction, the springs included in the estates became less regular with the disappearance of trees and the thinning of the soil.    

 

When tea replaced coffee in the 1880s, massive deforestation affected the ‘mid country’ where new estates were established on former chena lands. As a result, not only fields, but also rivers of the wet zone became silted, and their flow irregular. The bed of the Maha Oya was raised by 11 ft., that of the Sitawaka Ganga, a tributary of the Kelani Ganga, by 20 ft.; the Kalu and the Kelani Ganga became unnavigable from the 1880s, and overflowed their banks during heavy rains, while sand bars at the mouth increased the risk of floods. The waters of the Kelani Ganga, which were described as “beautifully transparent as it is fed chiefly by mountain streams” at the beginning of the 19th century, became exceedingly muddy, and one of its tributaries which formed the “finest bathing place in the island” in the early 1880s in the experience of Governor Gordon, washed along heavy silt as soon as plantations were opened upstream.[13]

 

Once again, a legislation was enacted to protect irrigation works but did little to prevent future silting as it safeguarded the interests of the planters: the paddy cultivation ordinance 23 of 1889, was “so framed as to afford adequate protection against injury to irrigation channels without undue hardship to the owners of adjoining properties” [14].  According to the Agent in Matale in 1896, “careless wording of the ordinance has made the law inoperative. I have had the case where 18 drains have been turned into an ela, naturally to the destruction of the latter. The people would of course have their civil remedy. But the Kandyan villager is always reluctant about going to law with his European neighbor”. Again in 1905: “injury to irrigation channels and paddy fields from wash and silt from the numerous new clearings (…) Engineering difficulties would be very costly to overcome. The law as it stands does not help in these cases”. In 1890, in Rayigam and Pasdun korales of Kalutara “there were many well founded complaints of damage occasioned by silt washed down into paddy fields from tea clearings, complaints were also made of the difficulties of procuring jungle sticks for fencing”. In 1898, in Uva: “It is always imprudent to sell for tea planting land through which an ela runs. This however has happened frequently but more often at the instance of Government than of the villager. Great damage results to elas and fields through the clearing of land above them and an expenditure of some 7,000 Rs will be entailed in repairing the Aluth Ela near Badulla town, solely in consequence of the damage resulting of the opening of the Ilverton estate just above”.[15] In many cases, the estates grudgingly paid compensation to field owners instead of undertaking permanent works such as the building of silt traps and of crossings over the irrigation channels. Some paddy cultivators benefitted from the wash of plantation manure. But on the whole, these nuisances led to strained relations between village and estate: this was especially the case in the densely populated mid-country areas[16].

 

In 1908, still another ‘rice cultivation committee’ was set up and reported district by district on the effect of silting and drying up of springs, but also more generally on the state of paddy cultivation. It tended to minimize the adverse ecological impact of plantation development on rice cultivation, insisting rather on the economic impact, due to the greater profitability of crops other than paddy (including hill paddy) and on the attraction exerted by higher wages on rubber or tea which deprived paddy cultivation of necessary labour. The most detailed testimony was that of Hellings, Government Agent at Ratnapura, but he considered that silting could be a blessing in disguise because silt is rich in manure[17].   

 

The rubber boom in the Sabaragamuwa and Kalutara districts and the coconut boom in the North Western province resulted in a form of re-afforestation of the slopes of the mid-country which were used by villagers for slash and burn cultivation, but nevertheless disrupted the water systems. In addition to the environmental impact, the expansion of village housing and gardening and the diversification of resources were hampered. In areas where large tea, rubber or coconut estates surrounded village land, actual landlessness became apparent around 1930, and led the authorities to attempt to stop indiscriminate alienation. According to the report on the census of 1911, “unless closely watched, there is little doubt that alienation of large areas of land for tea and rubber may adversely affect the villager not only by depriving him of grazing ground for his cattle, but by drying up sources which water his fields and, in spite of reservations, there is some reason to believe that there are cases in which this has occurred” [18].  In 1926 and 1927, cases of silting were given publicity during the sittings of the Land Commission which received petitions on the subject. In the Central province, “the silt problem in respect of the Gampolawela Rajaela has been a constant source of complaints for many years (…) At a representative meeting of the owners of estates above the ela and field owners the former promised to pay not more than 20 Rs an acre towards cost of overcrossings and signed an agreement to pay. Subsequent attempts to collect the money failed”. In the Matara district, “considerable damage caused to paddy cultivation by the washing down of silt from newly opened tea and rubber estates, particularly in the hilly regions of Morawak korale. In one village that I visited almost a whole valley has been permanently ruined by this cause”. In the Ratnapura district: “capitalists recklessly clear and plant right up to the edge of the fields and channels in complete disregard of the silting. Complaints of silt damage by such action are constantly received”. But such attitude was not prevailing in 1913, when E.B. Alexander, Government Agent of the same province, proposed to lease or sell stream reservations along his Rilhena estate to B.A. Thornhill, who had willfully planted them in rubber in 1910, commenting that “contrary to his predecessor Cookson, he thought that paddy cultivation would not be affected”.[19] The settlement officers were regularly confronted with these problems, for example, in Omatta village in 1933: “The grain tax commutation register and old plans showed that these owitas claimed were paddy fields some years back and silted. The villagers stated that the silting was caused by the opening out of the large rubber estates in the area: a good paddy field of 25 acres ruined by the silt from a steep plantation of rubber ; these fields were neglected during the days of rubber boom and the villagers inform that it is not worthwhile to cultivate these ruined fields”[20]

 

In the drier areas where tanks were used for paddy cultivation, their water storage capacity was reduced by silt. In some cases, reservoirs were included in the estates and planted up: there were several such occurrences in the Nuwara Eliya district during the coffee era which came to light when villagers protested. For example, in Uda Hewaheta, a tank which irrigated 200 acres was sold in 1864 as forest to the Amunumulla coffee estate: “The earnestness and pertinacy with which these unfortunate villagers represent their grievance is of itself sufficient to shew that it is substantial”[21] Much later, in the coconut belt, many similar cases occurred and similar complaints were aired. For example, near Giriulla, “a small abandoned tank which an estate proprietor wanted to purchase (…) the villagers at once claimed that it was essential for their fields and have started vigorously clearing the bund and channel”. Near Dandagamuwa: “ There is a small tank bordered on three sides by a large coconut estate whose proprietor, Dr. A.S. Goonewardena of Panadura, claims the tank as his private property He contended that the tank was formerly a paddy field purchased by his father-in-law, and that the tank was in reality a water hole dug up by the estate for the use of cattle. But the northern boundary according to his deeds is a tank bund, which clearly indicated the existence of a tank before the purchase (…) The villagers stated that the tank existed from time immemorial and that the estate took possession of it and attempted to convert it into a paddy field only about 25 years ago. They ask that the tank be reserved as at present they have to depend solely on rain water to cultivate their paddy fields”. Near Narammala “About half the village is an extensive coconut estate belonging to Mr. Dodwell and co. The villagers complain that they could not cultivate their fields owing to want of water. There had been a large tank in the village but unfortunately it had been sold by Government several years ago (…) Villagers said what they needed was water; they said there was an abandoned tank which if restored would provide water for all the villages in the wasama. Inspected the tank, it is a sort of natural lake, the water from the hills and from springs is retained by a long ridge of living rock. There is a breach at one place about 10 ft. wide. Very many years ago when this breach was closed about 6 acres of land was submerged: the tank had then irrigated several paddy fields lower down. These are now coconut plantations”.[22]

 

Denial of peasant access to water by plantation owners or workers was regularly mentioned in the diaries of the Settlement officers working in the province of Uva, as in the case of Kirawanagama and Beraliyapola where springs dried, stream reservations were cleared, top soil and grass cover removed, water diverted towards estate lands[23]: “All the villagers complain very bitterly that the streams which irrigate the extensive paddy fields in the villages are gradually drying up. They stated that the streams had their sources within the estate above the village and that at the time when the lands belonging to the village were alienated, adequate reservations for the sources of the streams and their beds were made. The forests near the sources which incidentally serve as village forests for these villagers are being surreptitiously but regularly denudated of trees by labourers on the estate. The top soil within these forests up to a depth of 3 to 4 feet is being removed for the purpose of making compost manure (…) the reservations along streams have in many cases been leased to labourers and are planted in guinea grass. In addition, storage tanks have been built in the beds of streams and water is conveyed by pipes not only for the use of the labourers but for watering their gardens also. The villagers have petitioned government on several occasions but have so far not obtained redress”

 

In the North Western province, the highlands of Madure korale were sold by headmen to plantations, leaving little space for villagers[24]: “Gallewa, a very big village, a small acreage of which is claimed or owned by the villagers themselves. The best lands, that is those on the hillsides, and tops, have been sold to a company (…) Mahawela, a village very similar to Gallewa except that more land here has been sold to outsiders. It is sad to see the villagers forced to live in the unhealthy villages, whilst the healthy hillsides and hilltops are in the possession of outsiders. The villagers complained to me that owing to the location of the estate on the hill, their fields were being deprived of water. Another complaint was that oil in the elas leading through this estate spoils their sources of drinking water and even ruin their fields. Superintendents in these malarial districts are in the habit of pouring oil into stagnant pools of water found in elas in the view of preventing mosquito breeding, but they scarcely realize what untold damage is done to paddy crops and villagers. I saw in one ela oily water trickling into the Deduru Oya, and the water in the river just beneath rubber estate full of oil at a spot where a villager was trying to make his buffaloes drink”. “Pahala Ogodapola is a small village inhabited only by 9 families. Irrigation facilities in the village could have been improved by restoring an abandoned tank found in the village but unfortunately part of the tank bed has been alienated by the Crown many years ago to the estate: this portion has now been planted up by the estate. Pasture land according to the villagers is their most pressing need [it is forbidden on Delwita estate]. Most of their cattle are now being pastured far away in Dodangaslanda on estates belonging to the Senanayake and Kotelawala families”

 

In an indirect way, paddy cultivation may have been affected by the restriction of pasture land reducing the numbers and impairing the health of buffaloes. Cattle were taken for grazing on the unforested highlands (patanas) in areas such as Uva and Dolosbage, or on the regrowth of vegetation after a chena season in the mid-country, and these grazing grounds were quite often sold as Crown lands to planters. Roberts denies any such impact; according to him buffaloes were not regularly required in paddy cultivation, and the actual reduction in their numbers was the result of epidemics brought from India rather than contraction of the available space. If he is right in explaining the diminution of buffaloes by the occurrence of cattle murrain or rinderpest, the fact that buffaloes could no longer recruit their health in up-country areas must have exposed them more than before to the attacks. In addition, cattle trespass on unfenced estates was from the beginning a major source of tension between planters and villagers: animals still roamed in areas where they used to graze at large before the opening of plantations.

 

Besides environmental factors affecting paddy cultivation, the much higher profits which could be derived from plantation products between 1900 and 1930 was indirectly responsible for the abandonment of paddy fields and their planting up in rubber or coconut after 1900. Conversion into coconut was common in the Kurunegala district. The Settlement Officer Fraser noticed in 1905 the process at work in Horambawa near Katugampola and his successors Luddington and Leach compared in 1927 the situation with the surveys effected during the previous decade in the villages of Konaputuhera, Medagama, Dodampawela, Wirambuwa where the disappearance of paddy was marked. In Madakumburumulla where an estate claimed a tank whose bund was made up of an outcrop of solid rock in an ideal situation, “1000 acres were practically planted up”; in Bagoda “a large amount of abandoned paddy, reason, shortage of cattle, yet this village offers the best grazing ground I have seen yet,”; in Henmulla where the villagers had only the reservations for the fields left; in Henegedara where many of the paddy fields were being converted into coconut gardens, and were coveted by the landgrabber F.H. Jayawardene[25]. Conversion of paddy fields into rubber plantations was also frequent in Western and Southern provinces. It was already noticed in 1917 by the Kalutara Revenue officer[26]: “This has become a perfect craze and if nothing happens to check it, there is no doubt that in a few years it will entirely supplant the cultivation of food. Hundreds of acres [more than 1000 acres] of owita lands which used to produce only food or were used as pasturage have gone into rubber and even extensive tracts of paddy fields are similarly treated”.   The Government agent of Galle made the same remark in 1916 and 1925: “the planting up with rubber of all the available small village lots is becoming very general throughout the district. Paddy fields covered with silt become rubber gardens, and the same product is gradually pushing out cinnamon and citronella” “the tendency is I think rather to forsake paddy growing for the more remunerative culture of tea, rubber and coconuts, and wherever possible low lying deniyas are being drained and planted with rubber”.    

 

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On the basis of general assessments in various reports and scattered evidence, it is difficult to establish the extent and time continuance of the impact. By focusing on a particular area over a long period, one can try to overcome the difficulty. Scanning systematically through the diaries of the Assistant Government Agent in Kägalla from the 1870 to the 1932, one finds regular occurrences of erosion, silting, water diversion etc. which, even if they cannot be measured, at least demonstrate their prevalence.[27]

 

The first recorded occurrences of silting and landslides predate the major expansion of plantations and may have been connected with exceptionally heavy rains and with forest felling for lumber on the steep slopes above the valley of the We Oya:  : “the few fields we passed [above Bulatkopitiya] were much injured by the elas overflowing and covering the fields with sand and stones” (20.11.1871) Dramatic floods, 600 houses destroyed, cattle drowned, paddy crop lost for 2 seasons (23.09.1872). Landslide and silting at Uduwewela, “a process that has been going on gradually for the last 3 or 4 years” (16.11.1872).

At the same time, the first infringement by planters to paddy cultivation is recorded in the Aranayake area: “Complaint is made that the ela which conducts the water to Rahala and Selawa fields (in all 30 acres) cannot be repaired as it passes through the Getakohoella estate and the superintendent here will not permit the villagers to enter the estate. Headmen ordered to make a respectful [sic] representation” (21.06.1873)

 

With the extension of tea estates to the Kelani valley in 1885, silting cases became a common occurrence: “bathing pools are now choked up with sand and wash from tea estates” (23.03.1885, Yogama).   “Ekneligoda [the chief headman] sends a list of paddy fields in the Three korales covered over and rendered useless by the wash from ten estates. On the face of the report there would appear to be a case for compensation on the part of the Government who sold the land or of the planters who opened it” (15.07.1885). Among these cases, that of Ardross estate affecting Panawitiya village is exemplary: half the forest highlands appropriated by the Crown by the ‘Ievers chena settlement’ had been sold to the planter without proper protection of the paddy fields : “Inspected a range of fields that had been thrown out of cultivation by the wash from Ardross estate. The fields are irrigated by a channel which is filled by means of a dam close to the estate store. The dam has been broken down and the channel has been silted up. After some conversation with the villagers and Mr. Streeting, the superintendent of the estate, we came to the following agreement, that the superintendent was to rebuild the dam and clear the channel, but that I was to pay him 10 Rs as the villager’s share of the work; that in the future the estate and the villagers were to keep the dam and ela in repair, the estate giving two men and the villager one man on the work for such repairs” But the proprietor Mc. Martin practically repudiated the agreement” (31.07.1885). Eight years later, the trouble to paddy cultivation was not over: “By clearing and planting tea on either side of the watercourse, it has been filled up with the silt of the estate and dried up, and therefore it is difficult to take water now to the field. Since the past year, the cultivation of this field has been given up. This watercourse cannot be repaired but should be constructed anew”[28] . Another case was that of Kanangama estate: “I found that the fields had been silted up as stated, and as there appeared to be no way by which the wash could be stopped, I suggested the manager that the estate should buy the fields. He said the proprietor [Fairweather] would we willing to do this” Fairweather proposed 10 Rs per acre: “I do not think this is a fair price, he should pay at least double this in my opinion” Finally the price was fixed at 20 Rs. (3.10.1885).

 

In the 1891s, the preoccupation of the villagers with the impact of plantation development on paddy cultivation began to be more vocal, if the numerous petitions are considered as a reliable indicator of their opinion, as in this typical example[29] : “ They are the owners of the paddy field called Menewasam kumbura, they pay tax for it, and their names are entered in the commutation register. The two waste bits of land called pillewas which lie on either side of the said paddy field, upper and lower portion, also belong to them, of about 1 pela in extent, extending as far as the cry, which can easily be asweddumized, was to their great regret and surprise surveyed by government surveyor, while surveying the Crown land on the other side of the oya. Also their paddy field called Hiddelana kumbura adjoining the ela, a portion of which field is washed off by the high water of the said ela. That the petitioners having reason to suspect that they will be put into great inconvenience and hardship should the said pillewas or chenas be sold for tea estates, as they have not much of land to protect their fields and as they can asweddumize. Petitioners pray that they may be allowed to cut a ditch on the other side of the ela and secure the field from being washed off”. Confrontations between planters and villagers became more frequent, as in Ganapalla: “Countercharges between the villagers and the superintendent. Ganapalla estate is in the wrong, having silted up half a range of fields. Some fields he arranged to buy out, 40 Rs an acre, and make a present to his neighbours. For the rest he will make a channel” (19.07 and 6.09.1892). Or in Kanuggala: Lyndhurst estate tapping a stream for their turbine deprived Uda Kanuggala paddy cultivators of their water supply and they lost one year of crop. The estate “would have a weak case in court as it uses water to which the fields have prior right” (10.09.1892 and 22.11.1892). Or in Rangegama[30]: “About 8 or 10 years ago, a share of the forest lands of the said gamwasama was taken to the Crown and sold to the tea planters. Since the planting the memorialist fields are covered with sand washed down from the clearings and in another year or two all the fields will have to be abandoned as heaps of sand. If the proprietors of the Rangegama estate wanted to save the memorialists fields from being covered with silt he could have done so by opening a large drain  to carry the wash away to the stream, but no such consideration for the villagers property and their loss are entertained by most of the planters.”.

 

The colonial administration was split between pro-planters and defenders of the natural resources. Between 1895 and 1897, Frederick Lewis of the Forest department warned that “the Kelani will silt up so as to render boat traffic almost impossible by 1898. As he can give chapter and verse for what he says based perhaps on the most intimate knowledge of all the rivers which any European possesses, he should be examined by the Kelani valley railway commission” (1.03.1895), and his superior, in response to the critics of the planters voiced by T.N. Christie, pointed out that  “In Ceylon constant complaints are made of the gradual silting up of the Kelani Ganga. If reference is made to a map showing Crown lands it will be seen that it is the catchment area of this river which has suffered most from denudation”[31]. In the case of Karandupone estate, while in 1898 the Agent considered that it had to pay damages to the villagers whose lands had been taken to build the estate road or silted by the estate (15.12.1898), his successor declared (31.03.1904): “I am afraid the villagers are very slack and have been trading on getting compensation out of the estate at infinitum. The bund of the channel is in a hopeless state of neglect, I have warned them to repair the beaches. But I don’t think they mean to do anything except temporary patchwork. They have no communal labour on their field works in this district. Each man is supposed to look after his own little portion and if a slip occurs which he can’t cope with it can’t be helped. Now that a final settlement with the estate had been made the villagers will be forced to safeguard their interests or lose by their neglect” . And while a soil denudation commission of 1904 had recommended that no land whatever should be alienated in the proposed Kelani valley reserve “on account of the great danger of soil erosion and the consequent flooding of the Kelani river”, the Kägalla Agent provided a limited list of 9 cases of silting, including only one extensive case, that of Yatideriya estate at Undugoda ( 14 fields silted for the last 15 years)[32]  

 

In spite of these findings and protests, the cases of silting and troubles to water management continued: “Silt piled 4ft. high on a native man’s paddy field below the Ettie estate drain which led right on to this field” (2.11.1896). And the attempts by planters to encroach on villagers’ rights did not cease: “Mr. Stuart of Inguragalla estate wants to buy some land at Aranayake which has been reserved for the protection of paddy fields below. He seems to think there is a poor reason for reservation. I admit it may seem a poor one to an intending purchaser, but not to the paddy field owner” (8.01.1898). “Complaint by the village headman about Yatideriya factory diverting all the water of the Andawela stream” (12.08.1899). Hatbawe ela diverted by the estate (20.06.1908)

 

By the beginning of the 20th century, there was a rush to develop rubber estates at lower elevations, often in association with tea section on the upper slopes (21.04.1910 – 16.10.1910) and the environmental impact of initial felling was similar to that of the opening of tea estates, as in the case of Niyadurupola rubber estate: “Half of the fields covered with sand and stones and ela almost obliterated. The superintendent undertakes to have the ela cleared and with much forbearance the field owners accept this. I told them that if they went to court they would secure substantial damage for loss of their crops (…) Complaints made against the aracci of Bopitiya and other headmen by Mr. Crocker the superintendent. The Ratemahatmaya reported that during the enquiry held by him into these complaints at the estate bungalow Mr. Crocker assaulted the aracci of Bopitiya” Crocker was fined of 50 Rs for that. A new superintendent (Robb) “pays no attention to the Agent’s representations” and was menaced to be sued for silting the Batuwana oya and fields (5.10.1911). But the repair of the oya by Robb was so defective that it has been washed away at the first rains (12.12.1912)

 

Between 1910 and 1920, in a political context marked by the violent repression by armed planters of ethnic disturbances by Sinhalese against Muslim traders, the administrators of the district were constantly compelled to mediate between planters and villagers affected by silting and other troubles. At Knavesmire, Glenalla and Katugaha estates (10.05.1910); at Asgangula, Mayfair estate (Ambepussa), Gasnawa and Eadella (December 1912 – February 1913); at Gevilipitiya and Duldeniya (August 1913); at Ambadeniya (September 1913); at Getiyamulla, “channel completely filled up by silt from Yatideriya. The superintendent refuses to do anything on the ground that there is an amuna at the head of the fields. This has been in existence for years and the ela was not silted before the clearing of the estate” (18.01.1914); along the Hettimulla – Hatgampola road (29.10.1914). “Galapitamada superintendent refuses to pay on the ground that the damage was due to the field owners having neglected their elas” (28.01.1918); peasants petition against Nagolla estate which diverts the water irrigating Karandupone fields (25.03.1918); silting by Para estate and near Galigamuwa (10.07 and 8.10.1918); a bad case of silting at Liniyakaduwa by Gasnawa estate (19.09.1919); silting by Pallegama estate silting at Galapitamada (10.06.1919 and 21.10.1920); bad silting by Karandupone estate (11.12.1919); by Golinda estate (8.05.1920).

 

In his Administration report for 1914, the Assistant Agent Burden mentioned the numerous cases linked with the new rubber clearings in the Four and Three korales and considered that stream reservations were non-efficient to prevent the mud being carried by the drains: “The silting up of the Sitawaka river if it continues much further will result in a situation of seriousness for Dehiowita (…) the drainage from the bazaar does not flow into the river (…) The only remedy is for clearing of forest and chena for tea and rubber cultivation to cease for some years. The rivers and streams will then have an opportunity of cutting their way through their original beds again” But nothing was done and on 24.05.1927 another Agent wrote in his diary: “ at Dehiowita the Public Works department had been unjustly blamed for blocking up an ela, when the real trouble is the failure of the natural drainage system throughout the upper Kelani valley owing to silt from innumerable estates. I am told the bed of the Sitawaka ganga has been raised by no less than 20 ft.. It seems time that stringent rules were made with regard to the method of opening up land on these steep hill sides and the growing of cover crops might be made compulsory on all rubber estates in the wet zone”. In another area, “floods around Bulatkopitiya are not an annual but a monthly occurrence, and I am convinced that Government will be very badly advised to allow the felling of any more jungle on hilltops in the Kägalla district. The jungle on hill tops acts as a sponge and holds up moisture, in a way that clean weeded rubber estates do not” (30.06.1920)

 

With the post-war rubber boom of the 1920s, cases of silting continued unabated in spite of a new awareness of the effects of indiscriminate clearings. At Ussapitiya : “about 6 acres of paddy fields badly silted by the result of the overflow of the ela, caused it is said by the new clearing of the Elapalawa estate (…) The ela running through and into this yaya was sufficient to carry all the refuse water of this little valley until the hills were cleared and opened in tea and rubber. Thereafter the volume of water increased suddenly by about six-fold and the ela no longer served as a watercourse, and the stream flowed over its banks and devastated the paddy fields. In one place I dug through the deposit of silt for 3 ft. and still did not reach the mud of the paddy field below. The water has made a new course straight to the fields and has breached and crossed the old ela carving out a fairly deep gully through the lower fields. The villagers told me that Mr. Ondaatje proctor is negotiating with them on behalf of the Elapalawa estate.” (24.07.1920)  “The people of Etnawala have made some attempt at self help in clearing away silt which has come down from Etnawala estate. A considerable amount has been deposited at one end of the fields and the cultivators have removed and heaped it up in mounds at intervals. The option of compensation is still being discussed by the superintendent and villagers, but the estate does not deny liability” (22.09.1920); at Arama near Aranayake, the Government refused to sell land: “if the jungle is felled damage will be caused to the paddy fields below as these latter have been eating into the jungle and the banks are consequently very steep” (19.10.1920); at Siyambalawela “silting from estates have filled up the channel, causing flood water to overflow and breach the banks. Thereafter all the silt appears to have been carried through the breaches leaving the channel deeper than it was originally, a deplorable result as the level appears now too low to feed certains of the fields. Such are the results of the accursed system of clean weeding, which ought to be legally abolished in all rubber and tea producing countries” (19.11.1923); at Watura “the whole valley, like so many valleys in this district, has become blocked with silt by the opening of rubber lands during the last 1-15 years. The oya has changed its course, lost its depth, and a large extent of paddy has been rendered useless. Nothing could now be done except at enormous expense and with small chance of permanent success” (15.04.1924)

 

Between 1925 and 1930, the Kägalla diaries are filled with a litany of silting cases, especially after 1926 when the government began to consider the necessity of a new land policy and the rural population became conscious of its new political power. This is a list of such cases: at Kendawe (22.05.1925); at Labugolla estate: where the paddy field owner refused the compensation offered

(6.08.1925); at Alagalla, where villagers protested against the silting resulting from the reopening of a former coffee plantation (6.05.1926); by Eadella estate (18.09.1926); by Panana estate where “there is plenty of silt but the damaged land does not belong to the petitioner at all, the claim is nothing but an impudent attempt to extort payment from the estate and at the same time establish some sort of claim to the land” (3.12.1926 and 6.04.1927);  at Parakaduwa (12.01.1927); Gonapalla (23.01.1927); at Epalawa “the main ela has been blocked with sand and breached in several places, its restoration will be rather a big job and is certainly a case for inspection by the department of irrigation” (5.06.1927);  at Eheliyagoda “the damage extends to many acres and the case is the worst I have ever seen. At least three estates are to blame and it will be difficult to assess compensation if this is to be paid” (7.06.1927); by Para estate (21.09.1927); by Forest Hill estate (14.03.1928); by Epalawa estate (20.03.1928 and 4.03.1930); by Millangoda estate where “the trouble is particularly bad though the estate has already spent a considerable sum in remedial measures. It is a pity that estate superintendents do not consult the irrigation department before opening new clearings in the neighborhood of paddy fields. If scientific methods were adopted much of the damage caused by silting could probably be avoided” (5.12.1928); at Naranbedda by the planter of Taptonwood estate who got land on re-afforestation lease and planted jak and papaw without proper care to paddy fields below (17.06.1928, 22.04.1929 and 16.07.1929);  at Anhettigama by Noori estate (29.04.1929); by Rosyth estate, where “the superintendent accepts to pay compensation, but it is always difficult matter to apportion the responsibility fairly in these cases” (11.04 and 15.06.1929); at Asmadala and Kandegedara  (16-17.07.1929); at Levuke (2.09.1929); at Dunumale near Galapitamada (7.11.1929); at Burunnawa (14.11.1929). Giving evidence before the Soil erosion committee (5.09.1929), the Kägalla agent declared: “the silt almost always comes from new clearings”.

 

The last serious cases of silting were reported in 1930: 6.01: We Oya estate; 8.02: Duldeniya; 12.02: Pohorambe; 27.02: Udehenkanda; 3.03: Meneripitiya, 4.03: Epalawa; 9.07: Biddescar; 18.07: Tismalpola; 2.09: We Oya again; 18.11: Udagaldeniya; 17.12: Jinsena. Two years later, rubber plantation expansion had been stopped by the great depression, and the Government Agent of the province reported that “there has been very little trouble from silting. The partial abandonment of rubber, which has resulted in increase of undergrowth among the rubber trees has also had its effect”.[33]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

 

 

 

[1] See my contribution to Richard Grove, Vinitha Damodaran and Satpal Sangwan (eds.) Nature and the Orient, Essays on the environmental history of South and South East Asia. Delhi, Oxford University Press, 1998, p.793-827, and my recent papers “Highland Appropriation by the Plantation Sector in the Kägalla District (1870-1930)”

https://slkdiaspo.hypotheses.org/6732; “The Ceylon land settlement department and its fight against land speculation from 1897 to 1930” https://slkdiaspo.hypotheses.org/6950; “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

[2] Ceylon sessional paper n° 3 of 1931: report on soil erosion in Ceylon

[3] Ceylon sessional paper n° 43 of 1882

[4] Ceylon Sessional paper n° 11 of 1894, Sessional paper n° 22 of 1895 (the report includes a list of all the estates in the Kelani catchment area in 1895 with their acreage – cultivated and uncultivated), Sessional paper n° 42 of 1905 (the report includes a list of estates affected by silting)

[5] Ceylon sessional paper n° 12 of 1921

[6] as early as 1847, the Kandyan chiefs complained of the Waste lands ordinance of 1840 which established the Crown property of highlands and their alienability to planters: they “did not cut down the timber in some parts of their lands for fear the rivulets and water courses should become dried up by exposure. If the government claims these as forest lands, what was to become of them all?” Colonial Office Records, series 54 /238 Torrington to Secretary of State for the Colonies 12.08.1847 encl 2, Notes of the 1st conference held at Kandy 29.07.47 with a deputation of chiefs and priests of the Kandyan Provinces.

[7] Ceylon Hansard, 13.12.1934 p. 3204

[8] Report of the Kandyan Peasantry Commission, Ceylon Sessional Paper of 1951; the memoranda sent by various individuals and local societies, often written by teachers on notebooks, most of them in Sinhala, some in the form of village monographs, are kept in the Kandy repository of the National Archives (108/28). The dualist thesis is defended by R. Snodgraas, Ceylon, an Export Economy in Transition. Homewood, Irwin, 1966. M. Roberts, “The Impact of the Waste Lands Legislation and the Growth of Plantations on the Techniques of Paddy Cultivation in British Ceylon: a Critique”, Modern Ceylon Studies 2, 1970, p. 157-196. On dualism, see also my “Village versus plantation: colonial and post-colonial ideologies and practices” [http://slkdiaspo.hypotheses.org/5110]

[9] CO54/432, 12.01.1868

[10] SLNA 47/1 Diary Assistant Agent Nuwara Eliya, 4.08.1884, 6.12.1882, 18.04.1885, 9.11.1886. Administration report of Nuwara Eliya for 1884 (p. 65-66A); Paddy tax reassessment report for Uda Hewaheta, Ceylon Sessional Paper 14 of 1890; Moir report in Governor Gordon to Knutsford, 22.10.1889 reproduced in Eastern pamphlet 52; Administration report Central province 1883, p. 23A; Administration report Matale 1883. CO 54/517, Governor of Ceylon to Secretary of State for the Colonies,126, 29.03.1879; see also Report of the Kandyan Peasantry Commission, Sessional Paper of 1951, p. 116-117. Sessional Paper n° 43 of 1882 (D’A Vincent report), § 110-114.

[11] J. Emerson Tennent, Ceylon, London 1859,  vol II, p. 206; Ceylon SP n° 4 of 1867, (Report on irrigation in Ceylon);  SP n° 43 of 1882 (D’A Vincent report), § 100-103; Grain tax commission report Sessional paper of 1877);  Sessional Paper 12 of 1921 (Lushington report). See also for a later period I.D.T. de Mel, ‘Comparison of rainfall over Ceylon during the two 30-years periods 1911-40 – 1931-60’, Tropical Agriculturist 127, 1 (1971), and Meher Homji, ‘Do Forests influence the climate?’, Science Today 16, 1 (1982).  

 

[12] Quoted in Gordon to Knutsford, Secretary of State for the colonies dated 22.10.1889 (Eastern Pamphlets n°52, HMSO)

[13] CO54/518, Governor to Secretary of State for the Colonies, 29.04.1879; SLNA 30 Diary of the Assistant Government Agent at Kägalla, 21.02.1885, 1.03.1895.   

[14] CO54/586, 60 17.02.1890; SLNA 6/10990 RN017579 13.11.1897

[15] Administration reports for Matale 1894 and 1896, 1901, Ceylon Sessional paper n°4 of 1890, Administration report for Uva, 1898.

[16] Examples in Ceylon Administration Reports   Central Province, 1926; Matara district, 1927 and 1928; Diaries of the District Agent Kägalla, July 1920 and April 1924; Diaries of the Land Settlement Officers, October 1933 (Kalutara district); Ceylon Sessional Paper of 1951, Report of the Kandyan Peasantry Commission, p. 316-317

[17] Ceylon Sessional paper n° 6 of 1908

[18] E.B. Denham, Ceylon at the Census of 1911, Colombo, Government printer, 1912, p. 115

[19] Administration report of the Central Province 1926, p. B9, § 119; Administration report for Matara 1927, p. C23 and 1928 p. C5 (the villages affected were: Tambe, Malinibada, Wellana, Molokgamuwa, Rambukana, Diddenipota, Henegama, Akuressa, Ketenwala, Makandure, Beragama, Dankoluwa, Banagala, Eramudugoda, Nimaluwa, Kekunewela, Waralla) ; Administration report Ratnapura for 1926, p. I9, SLNA lot 6, box 761, RN02499, 4.02.1913 and box 814 (Rilhena)

[20] Diaries of the Settlement officer and of the Assistant settlement officer Rajasingham, October 1933

[21] Sessional Paper 2 of 1872-3, Report of the Assistant Agent at Nuwara Eliya (Hartshorne) on the paddy cultivation ordinance

[22] Diary Kurunegala 26.10.1922: Diaries Assistant Settlement Officer P.O. Fernando, 23.09.1930, 11.02.1931; Ratnatunga 28.04.1938

[23] Diaries of Assistant Settlement Officers Ingledow, March 1936 and Abeyakoon, August 1939

[24] Diaries of the Assistant Settlement Officers Arndt 20 and 21.08.1930 and Wijekoon, 28.01.1939.

[25] Diaries of Fraser, 11.12.1905, Luddington, February to August 1927, Leach, January 1927.

[26] Administration report Kalutara 1917 (Brayne) p. A16-17; Diary of the Assistant Settlement officer Hughes, 6.12.1923 (Edandagoda village); Administration report of the Southern Province for 1916, p. C2 and 1925 p. C2; Diaries of Assistant settlement officers Hughes, 25.08.1924 (Hattaka village) , 1.09.1924 (Godamuke), Egan, 11.04.1927

[27] SLNA 30/2 (1861) to 30/60 (1939): references to the diaries are given in text between brackets.

[28] Kägalla kachcheri records, Panawitiya village file, report by Ekneligoda, 19.01.1893

[29] Kägalla kachcheri records, Basnagoda village, petition 469 of 1891 of Wickramaccilage Jotihami

[30] SLNA 6/10290, 18.10.1897

[31] CO54/637 (18.02.1897)

[32] Ceylon Sessional Paper 42 of 1905, appendix 6

[33]   Administration report Sabaragamuwa 1932 p.I7

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.



By Eric Meyer



During the last two decades of colonial rule, diverse but convergent factors led to a redefinition of the land policy and practice of the British administration: first, during the boom of the mid-1920s, awareness of the contradiction between the huge demand for land for plantations and the limited land available for villagers; second, during the great slump of the 1930s, pressure exerted through an incipient representative system by a landless peasantry on a plantation sector weakened by the crisis; third, during the world war, the relaxation of rules combined with growing Sinhalese nationalist claims leading to Independence.

The decision to review the land policy was taken in 1927-1928 by the colonial Government, motivated by a combination of reasons:

  • Criticism, by a section of the westernized bourgeoisie adopting the nationalist stance and at the same time investing in the plantation economy, of the land policy based on the 1897 ordinance.
  • Desire of the colonial administration to rationalize and unify the management of land matters through an extension of the role of the Settlement department.
  • Atmosphere of political reforms encouraged by the Donoughmore commission
  • Political concern about possible peasant unrest.

Two valuable papers deal with the general issue of the factors behind the positions taken by the Land Commission: Vijaya Samaraweera, “Land as Patrimony”[1], and Mick Moore “The Ideological History of the Sri Lankan Peasantry”[2]. They question the defense of the ‘peasantry’ by a bourgeois-nationalist class of renters whose affluence was based on plantations which impinged on ‘peasant’ interests. What is missing in these papers is the detailed process by which the Land Commission came into being and took these positions. The following development will try to tackle the issue keeping in mind the general theories developed by these authors. Apart from the published reports of the commission, various memoranda, written and oral evidence collected by it, will be quoted extensively. These unpublished sources were available in the Colombo “old colonial secretariat” files (now the series 65 of the Sri Lanka National Archives) when I consulted them, and will be quoted under their original classification. 

The agrarian question seen by governor Clifford and the origins of the Land Commission

The genesis of the Land commission was recounted in 1930 in a dispatch sent to the Colonial office by the acting governor[3] : “There have always been spasmodic agitation in certain quarters against the working of the Waste lands ordinance as applied to chena lands in the Kandyan provinces. This agitation had in of recent years not been directed so much against the practice of the settlement department, whose fairness and equitable treatment of claimants inspired general confidence, as against the principles underlying the Waste Lands Ordinance of 1897 which were held to be unjust and inequitable, and also to a certain extent against the practice of some of the Revenue officers who were guided by the law and the existing law regulations”. In February 1927, a motion was passed in the Legislative council “ that in the opinion of this council the Land settlement officers should be instructed to give effect to evidence of long possession by periodical cultivation with fine grain of chena lands in the Kandyan districts not subject to taxation which lands are claimed as paraveni chenas”. The idea behind that motion was to ruin the presumption in favour of the Crown established by the ordinance of 1940. On the other hand,  “public attention was at that time becoming more and more focused upon the numbers of villagers who were becoming landless and the importance of taking early measures to secure that the villagers’ interests were not overlooked in the development of the colony’s lands and that everything possible was done to foster and maintain upon the land he class of small peasants”: the experiments tried in Batticaloa under the Peasant proprietary system and in Matara “served to concentrate attention upon this subject”. But the decisive factor was that “Sir Hugh Clifford was in full sympathy with this movement and in a paper read in March 1927 called attention to the urgent need of providing land for small holdings in the wet zone”.

What the official dispatch failed to disclose is a third factor, the intense pressure put on the government to sell Crown land for the extension of the plantations of rubber, coconut and tea, by the mid 1920s. This pressure was exerted more by Ceylonese entrepreneurs investing in rubber and coconut than by European planters who had dominated the land market during the previous decades, but at the same time a section of the Ceylonese nationalist press put the blame on the Government for favouring the big planters. The governor Hugh Clifford was Colonial secretary in 1912 and had been alerted to the land problems by John Fraser, the Settlement officer (see previous chapter on the history of the Settlement department). During his subsequent governorship (1925-1927), he rehearsed and put together his views, prompted by the debates of the time  A series of unpublished documents and discussions regarding applications for Crown lands for rubber in the interior of Kalutara district, and the sale of patanas in Uva, show the process which led him to convene a Land Commission.

The starting point was a memorandum (dated 26.03.1926) addressed to the Governor, after a private meeting with him, by Sir Marcus Fernando (1864-1936), an influential medical doctor turned businessman, closely connected with the powerful Karawa plantation owners of Panadura and Moratuwa, and politically conservative. The author pleaded for a speeding up of land sales by the Crown: “A stage has been reached in which fresh development of the planting industries are overdue and necessary for the healthy advancement of the colony. The spectacle of jungle or waste lands reaching 500 to 1000 Rs per acre is perilous both to the planter and the country (…) it is an unmistakable index of the fact that the demand for land is greatly in excess of the supply”. He added the usual argument of the colonial planters that “land should not lie idle” and he insisted on the necessity to propose allotments of different sizes in order to allow ‘middle class’ investors to coexist with large size entrepreneurs. The demand for tea and rubber mid country, for tea up-country, for coconut in the North Western province would necessitate “that large blocks of land be selected for alienation and cut up in large and small parcels (500, 50, 5 acres)”. The interests at stake were clearly expressed by another conservative politician involved in the plantation industry, F.A. Obeyesekere: “Many professional men in Ceylon have saved money and are anxious to invest it in land, but could not have a look in if blocks were more than 50 acres in extent” [4].

By the same time (April 1926), another influent Karawa plantation owner, C.E.A. Dias, applied to purchase an extensive block of Crown land (4,000 acres) in Pasdun/Hinidum pattu in the interior of the Kalutara and Galle districts (where about 10,000 acres were available), at a cost of not more than 75 Rs an acre, and the Revenue officer Burden approved the project, which was however abandoned after a critical paper titled ‘Rubber Eldorado’ was published in the Daily News (15.07.1926).  The previous year, at Dodampapitiya in the same district, an application by a European company (Lewis Brown) for 1,545 acres had been approved upon the decision of the Controller of Revenue (E.B. Alexander), in spite of  the criticism of the Panadura Mahajana Sabha, a nationalist association represented by C.E.V. Corea: in that area which was for a long time a reserved forest and was unreserved after debate, Alexander ruled that land should be sold in large blocks and the building of roads “and generally the development of the country” should be left to the estates. In another case, the Kalutara Mahajana Sabha, in August 1926, protested against the projected sale of 179 acres of Crown land by the same Burden to extend the Pimbura estate, very close to paddy fields and gardens, and the sale was stopped. [5]

In November 1926, Burden who was promoted Government Agent of the Uva province recommended the sale to the influent British planter S. Bostock of plots of Crown pasture land  (patana) adjoining his Aislaby estate, in spite of protests which, in his words “are always forthcoming in practically every instance of the survey of any considerable block of Crown patana in Udukinda and Yatikinda (…) The reservation of thousands of acres of patana for cattle grazing seems to me uneconomic in the extreme”. E.B. Alexander confirmed the sale, but the Udukinda Mahajana Sabha and the Legislative Council member D.H. Kotelawala protested, and a meeting was held at the Buddhist school of Bandarawela. The Daily News (6.01.1927) attacked the Government: “The government surrenders to the almighty planter (…) For all the high-sounding ideas that Sir H. Clifford absentmindedly proclaimed, there is and there will continue to be only one land policy in Ceylon, and that is to make the land safe for the exploiter (…) The day was not distant when coolie lines will be seen on the ruins of Kandyan village homes” . As a result, the sale was stalled.[6] 

The Governor commented these questions (16.10.1926) and discussed the issue with the acting Controller of Revenue Wait and the Settlement Officer Stace, underlining that “two quite opposite policies are being pressed upon us: a. The necessity for the speeding up of the sales of Crown land; and b. the advisability of restricting all future sales of Crown land to comparatively small blocks, with a view to the multiplication of peasant proprietors”. In congested areas the second option would be preferable, but that for lack of sufficient information a commission of enquiry would be necessary.

In his minute (7.11.1926), E.B. Alexander, Controller of revenue who was acting as Colonial secretary, thoroughly criticized the past land policy, or rather lack of policy. After a rather trite defense of the colonial project (“The development of states should be only regarded as a secondary consideration [but] on the other hand, the indigenous population is very lacking in enterprise, and it is in the interest of that population that facilities should be granted for enterprise to be brought in from outside”), he conceded two points:

“No reader of the report made by Mr. Lushington of the Indian Forest Services can fail to be impressed by the great mistakes made in the past in the disposal of crown land to the coffee and tea planters and to the serious consequences which have ensued in the diminution and contamination of the principal sources of water supply in Ceylon”.

“No student of the conditions which at present prevail in the districts in which the cultivation of the staple products (tea, rubber and coconut) is now being extended, can fail to observe without dismay the rapid exploitation of the villager and his expulsion from his ancestral land. The government has been powerless to check the almost universal demoralization which is resulting in Sabaragamuwa and elsewhere from the success which has attended the defiant and openly shameless practice of land grabbing. The government itself has had to surrender its claims to very large tracts of chena lands. Every boom in the prices of no matter what product is inevitably followed by a certain degree of demoralization [but] the demoralization would not have been so complete if the government had exercised a more energetic land policy. The weakness of Ceylon’s land policy is principally due to the absence of any cadastral survey of the island (…) Since the Waste lands ordinance was passed in 1897 and the Department of Land Settlement was inaugurated by H.E. West Ridgeway, succeeding administrations have given by comparison very little attention to land problems and very little encouragement to land settlement”.

He concluded that the only remedy was the development of the staff of the survey and the settlement department, and that a strong commission of inquiry could persuade the Legislative council to finance it.

The Governor, while admitting that the proposal raised “extremely difficult problems”, agreed with the creation of such a commission, stating that “the primary object of government is the multiplication of small holdings, provided steps can be taken to prevent improvident alienation” (10.12.1926).[7] In a further note on these affairs (12.01.1927), Clifford recognized that the previous policy of alienating large blocks in sparsely populated areas up-country for tea was not adapted to the development of rubber in already congested mid-country areas where it was done “without regard to the ultimate results of that policy (…) We are faced with the fact that the population of Ceylon has increased in a period of 70 years from about 1.7 million to well over 5 million souls, and it is precisely in the healthier part of the moist zone that this expansion has been greatest”. The past policy of speedy development of large estates should be abandoned in view of the enormous population growth in these areas, and a new policy planning should consider “the future expansion of agricultural peasantry” and encourage “its overflow to such areas of fertile Crown land as are still available”. “Our policy should be to encourage taking up of land by small local capitalists in comparatively speaking modest areas rather than dispose of it to big capitalists or to companies in large blocks. Our object should be to multiply the number of landholders among the indigenous population”.

On March 3rd 1927 the Legislative council decided to set up a commission to report on land laws, on the policy followed regarding alienation of Crown lands, and to make recommendations to provide for the protection of villagers and small holders. In the meantime, Clifford, who was to leave his post in June 1927, elaborated his position in three documents, one public, two others of restricted circulation, which he sent to the Colonial office in London, explaining that his intention was to “clear away misunderstanding between publicists and the planting community, European and Ceylonese, in exposing the fallacy of the theory that the latter, which for near a century has built up the prosperity of Ceylon and that of its indigenous inhabitants, are parasites draining the island of its wealth; in making clear the folly and futility of the attempts so frequently made by Ceylonese politicians of recent times to treat purely economic questions from an acute angle of racial prejudice and animosity; in showing that there is ample land of 1st class quality still available in the most fertile areas of the island alike for the development by capitalists and for the occupation of a very large number of self-respecting and self-supporting peasant proprietor”[8].

In ‘Some reflections’, a defense pro domo of the British land policy meant for the general public, Clifford first tried to clear the colonial administration of the suspicion that it favoured planters at the cost of villagers in the process of sale of Crown lands, and that its policy to defend Crown rights was too strict. Then he attempted to counter the school of thought which held that tea and rubber plantations “are a parasitic growth” which “owe their existence to a systematic series of acts of expropriation and spoliation”. Such a theory was historically untrue according to Clifford, first because the prosperity of Ceylon was proportional to the prosperity of the plantation sector up-country (timber felling and carpentry, vegetable and poultry, peasant coffee) and also because coffee and later tea was planted in sparsely populated or uninhabited areas, and because the villagers were not compelled by poverty to work on estates; this theory “tends to promote ill-feeling between different sections of the community whose economic interests are inextricably interlocked. With the development of rubber and coconut, ‘in the low country today the prosperity of the villagers is usually in direct ratio to their proximity to large estates”

Land grabbing was according to him a recent phenomenon connected with “the phenomenally rapid growth of the rubber industry” (adding that the same process occurred with the extension of the coconut industry) which created a demand which the principles of preservation of Crown land could not satisfy; hence “delays which men in a frantic hurry to avail themselves ere too late of the opportunities offered to them by successive rubber booms”. He then undertook to explain the mechanism of appropriation of chenas through sales by villagers: “Considerable areas of land, the chena rights over which had been declared to be the communal property of certain villages under the late Lord Stanmore’s Forest Ordinance 10 of 1885, were simply sold to land speculators; and the Government, finding itself confronted by men actually in possession, to whom this transfer of rights had voluntarily been made by villagers, was usually compelled to complete the purchase by accepting for the Crown’s rights to the soil the half improved value” [this is not exactly what the chena settlement and the Certificate of quiet possession system were] “in this way extensive areas, the right of user over which the Government had sought to secure in perpetuity to the permanent rural population, were sold by the latter to persons who were often unconnected with their community”. “The men who made these purchases in some instances retained for themselves and subsequently converted into rubber plantations the land which they had thus secured, while others sold them as speedily as possible at greatly increased prices to the owners of adjoining estates (…) The villagers all too often made with these purchasers of lands bargains of a highly improvident character” but “it has occurred that the astute villager had sold the same piece of land more than once, while the issue of extracts from the wattoru registers had to be discontinued  because copies of the same extracts were constantly being produced as proof of private title to a number of different chenas in different locations in the same wasama (…) In all this however I am unable to find any evidence of the villagers having been ‘expropriated’; and as regards ‘spoliation’, their own improvidence  was mainly to blame.  Though much of the land purchased from them eventually became the property of one or another of the big rubber companies, or of individual European or Ceylonese estate owners, the speculative work of buying up doubtful titles from villagers was for the most part conducted by their own countrymen”.  Clifford conceded that Government failed “to devise effective means of preventing the sale by villagers of chena lands” but that it was a difficult task “for a handful of Revenue officers to stand between a dense rural population and their own improvidence”. He concluded – two years before the depression – that “the real solid base of the economic prosperity and stability of Ceylon is her highly organized agricultural industries (…) broadened by the recent creation of the rubber industry and the expansion of the coconut industry” and that the growth of the indigenous population was proof of the benefits of colonization. He however could not support the view of the planters pressing for “the speeding up of the sale of Crown lands”.

In his ‘Message to the members of the Finance committee’, Clifford was more explicit on his views regarding rural development and the relations between the plantation industry and the peasant society; he pleaded for a system of allocation of land aimed at developing a strong peasant proprietor class: “When I returned to Ceylon at the end of 1925, I was concerned to find that Ceylonese peasants in ever increasing numbers were beginning to find work as wage earners on estates, more especially in the Low country. This I definitely regard as regrettable. In my opinion only economic necessity and sheer inability to obtain land on his own account will compel a Sinhalese villager to seek employment for wage on any estate, and the scheme which I have put forward should gradually have the effect of draining off from the estates of the island all Sinhalese who are not employed upon technical jobs, and the conversion of them into peasant proprietors”. This dualistic conception was popular at that time in reformist colonial circles and was theorized by Julius Boeke in 1930[9].

In his ‘Memorandum for the colonial conference’ Clifford enlarged the scope of his analysis by pointing out the impact of rubber development: “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”. It is to be noted that memorandum was not discussed at the London colonial conference, because its propositions could raise a hornet’s nest: the staff of the Colonial Office objected that “the question bristles with difficulties” and let the matter drop.

The reports of the Land Commission

The commission included elected members of the Legislative council and colonial administrators and sat for more than one year, during which time the Donoughmore commission sent by London enquired on the institutional future of Ceylon : announced in April 1927 by the governor Clifford, nominated in August after he left, sitting in Ceylon from 13 November 1927 to 18 January 1928 during which time the governorship was vacant, the Colonial Secretary Fletcher acting. The reports of the Land commission were printed as sessional papers of the Legislative council, but their information should be supplemented by the unpublished evidence collected by the commission[10], the commentaries on its proposals[11], the memoranda received by it from various individuals or bodies[12], which form a rich uncensored corpus of documents.

Its first report[13] insisted on the urgent necessity “to prevent the improvident alienation by villagers of their land pending settlement of their titles (…) such alienations are proceeding on a large scale usually at an undervalue”, through an ordinance prohibiting the alienation and mortgage of unsettled lands in the Kandyan provinces. It was based on a detailed report by the Government Agent at Kurunegala titled ‘the effect of Land settlement on the alienation of village lands’[14], which quoted numerous cases of settled villages where land sales had ceased.

The third report was much more detailed, and its proposals, reflecting the interests and the patronizing attitude of the emerging national bourgeoisie, led to a number of commentaries and criticisms[15]. Its main findings were:

  • The urgent need to make reserves for the present and future requirements of the indigenous population
  • That special provision should be made to reserve blocks of 10 to 50 acres for “middle and professional class, too wealthy to be classed as villagers, too poor to compete with big capitalists and companies (…) It is in our opinion distinctly for the benefit of the peasants that men of the educated classes should hold and cultivate estates of medium size (…) producing employment for the peasants and securing the residence among the peasants of men of culture and position”
  • That auction sale of Crown land be abandoned, that a Land registry replaced the Deed registry, and that Land Settlement operations be suspended pending the definition of what is a paraveni chena.
  • The complex legal mechanism of Land Settlement had led to various legal decisions which might be contradictory and rendered difficult for a claimant to dispute the Crown title to a chena. (The report included a detailed note on the Land Settlement operations which insisted on the principle that the field work was never left to headmen, and described the process of a model settlement whose effect is “to substitute individual ownership of definite surveyed separate blocks for a vague claim to a probably disputed undivided share in a large tract”. The final decision was always based on the merit of each case, but the settlement officer had no compulsive authority and if the claimant did not sign the agreement the case was referred to the court of law: “it frequently happens that a speculator buys up a small share and then attempts to grab the whole of the chenas and oust the villagers. The Settlement officer can say to him: ‘if you refuse to sign an agreement accepting your actual share, I shall urge the presumption that the land is at disposal of the Crown”)
  • Discontent created by settlement resulted from the difficulty to prove title to chenas by prescription, while in the past cultivation of chenas was a customary right attached to the cultivation of paddy fields, possibly on a communal basis: “For many generations the Kandyan villagers have been allowed to cultivate the village chenas according to their needs without interference”. The creation of individual rights to specific chenas thus affected the relations inside the village community.
  • Increasing the number of Settlement officers would help to “remove the cause which at present tempts the villager to sell his chenas, the uncertainty of title”
  • Acquisition of land sold to non-villagers should be possible for redistribution in case of landlessness

The following reports[16] dealt with the special demands of officers or of planters. The situation in the North Western province was discussed in the 5th report, following the demand of Hodson, the Government Agent, to stop land transactions in Wanni, Devamedi, Hiriyala and Madure, where speculation was maximal; the proposal was made to prevent speculative purchases in advance of settlement at very low prices (as in the case of Kiribamuna in Hiriyala Hatpattu purchased by an outsider at 2.5Rs per acre). The Commission decided to accept the proposal in spite of the opposition of Madawela and Senanayake who objected that the move could prevent the villagers from clearing their ‘paraveni chenas’; but the real reason behind their opposition was that it would freeze the land market in the area in which Madawela was interested.[17]

The final report of the commission[18] proposed the creation of a post of Land Commissioner, the institution of a ‘mapping out’ system instead of the application system in order to plan the alienation of Crown land, and of a system of unalienable tenure to prevent sales to outsiders, and the recognition by the Settlement department of the principle of paraveni chenas at least in the North Western Province.

The ‘Planters Raj’ fighting back during the sittings of the Land Commission

Just before and after the departure of Clifford, using the opportunity of an interregnum, and during the sittings of the Land Commission, attempts were made by planters and their allies to influence the government. The speech made in March 1927 before the Tea traders Association of the European planters by their representative at the Legislative Council, Thomas L. Villiers (1869-1959), is typical[19]: “There is no excuse more irritating than that of land being required for purpose of grazing (…) To let it stand idle when as everyone agrees  it is insufficient to grow and enrich good sized cattle, better could be made of the land”. The private letter sent by A. Wickwar, the Surveyor General, to M. Fletcher, the Colonial secretary acting as Governor, to persuade him to reverse the ban on Crown patana sales in Uva, shows the close connection between the planters and a section of the colonial administration [20]: “In accordance with your request made at Diyatalawa [the British army camp in Uva province] when we were discussing land matters, I now send the details of three separate applications for Crown lands, all of which have been refused. Two of them adjoin Ainslaby Estate, owned by Mr. Bostock, and the third adjoins Malwatte Estate owned by my brother O.S. Wickwar and myself. My reason for submitting Mr. Bostock application is that I was in charge of his estate when the land was definitively refused (…) The chief headman recommended the sale and inquired into the petition which two or three villagers put before him (…) Third case is an application for 12 acres by O.S. Wickwar, the land to the north and south of this lot is already the property of Malwatte”.

Another Villiers, Evelyn Charles (1884-1968), the superintendent of a large group of estates in the Kelani Valley (Hemingford) had applied for lands in the Kägalla (Humpitakanda) and Ratnapura districts (Badahelgoda) and through his relations, he thought he could overcome the restrictions put by the Land Commission to such sales: the lands should not be sold as long as ‘mapping out’ of the localities was not acted. In a private correspondence addressed to the private secretary of the Governor (28.03.1929), he wrote : “I had been told by the Controller of Revenue (E.B. Alexander) I could have the land  for 150 or 100 Rs respectively; after 3 ½ years I get a letter which puts the value of land at double what I had been told (…) I want these lands settled on me at the rate I was promised them by Alexander”. The new Controller of Revenue (Tyrell) reported that such a promise by Alexander or any other was ‘impossible’. Finally the land was put up for lease at 135 Rs an acre in May 1929, and E.C. Villiers was in 1931 appointed by Government to the State Council as representative of the European planters….[21]

A similar case of planter resistance was offered by the actions of L. Archdale, superintendent of a Kägalla estate (Lassehena) and speculator in land in his spare time, who had acquired cheaply from a local aristocrat, T.B. Morahaela, upon a contested sannasa, ninda lands, which he wanted to resell with a profit against the decision of the Land Commission to prevent alienation of unsettled lands. The Revenue officer and the Settlement officer had refused the sale qualified by them of ‘purely speculative claim’ but Archdale had obtained the authorization by the Executive council on the advice of the Controller of Revenue and of Sir Francis Molamure, representative of the Kandyans, closely connected with the influent families (Ellawala, Mideniya), who held that “the word ‘unsettled land’ did not apply to nindagam, viharegam or devalegam which have been recognized as such by Government by entering them in the Service Tenures Register[22]. This was contrary to the constant doctrine of the Settlement department expressed by the Settlement officer Fox in a letter of 12.12.1919 quoted in the report of the officers.

The law firm De Sarams was entrusted by a number of planters to defend them. In Denawaka Udakada (Ratnapura district), 218 acres were purchased by A.M.C. Rajasuriya, resold to Dr S.C. Paul who resold again to the Pelmadulla Rubber Co. led the Settlement Officer to comment: “As regards the preamble of the new land ordinance, its object is in brief to stop the traffic in village lands. One way to achieve this end is the prevention of sales by villagers, but a surer way is to prevent the transfer of village claims by a landbroker to a company. The broker himself has not as a rule the capital to enable him to open the land, and convert vague village claims into for example a valuable rubber estate. I was under the impression that the intention of the land commission was to prevent such sales by this ordinance. If it was not so, the ordinance loses a great deal of its effect.” [23]. In Kattange, a similar operation was done by one Mr. Ingram who purchased village shares for resale to the same rubber company. In Waleboda, a very poor devalegama on the borders of the Ratnapura district the beneficiary was the Anglo-American Direct Trading company who had purchased unsettled lands from S.D. Mahawalatenne who had pressed the nilakarayo to sell to him. His heirs J.C. Ratwatte (Dissave and shroff of a bank) and Barnes Ratwatte (the Ratemahatmaya) had not been able to perfect the title :“a purely speculative sale” according to the Government Agent Millington, but finally authorized as in the case of Archdale.[24] In another case, at Delwala, the firm on behalf of the Grand Central Rubber company put such a pressure on Government to open a land which was not legally settled on it that it had to refer the issue to the staff of the Colonial Office in London, which commented (Cowell): “We do not want the Secretary of State to be drawn into a political controversy as to the propriety of the transfer of lands in violation of recommendations of the Land Commission (…) We are skating on rather thin ice”[25]

The evidence collected from planters and other witnesses by the Land commission, and the questions and interventions of its members, especially D.S. Senanayake, G.E. Madawela and D.B. Jayatilaka, offer a valuable source to understand the conflicting interests at stake[26]. Marcus Fernando reiterated (21.03.1928) his views expressed in his memorandum of 1926, even opposing the idea of 50 acre blocks for middle class Ceylonese defended by D.S. Senanayake and C.V. Brayne: “It is only the rich man who can cultivate tea and rubber with any degree of success”; In the case of coconut, “in the Kurunegala district some years ago land could be bought at 50 Rs an acre, you have to pay 200 or 300 Rs now; you must reduce the cost of land by giving greater opportunities for alienation (…) I think it is objectionable to demarcate village lands, separate them for present and future use and place them in the hands of trustees”. Fernando added that “the trouble is that different government agents have different policies, one will alienate lands which his predecessor had refused”. Finally he accepted the idea that big and small planters could benefit from each other “the peasant holders will plant their holdings while working in the large estates, and these as well as middle class capitalists will participate in the road making and medical aid work, which only the large capitalists can successfully inaugurate and maintain in the pioneer development of a forest area”. Madawela “remarked that almost every clerk who went to the Kurunegala kacceri or courts bought a small piece of land, thus making provision for life”.

The deputation of the Planters Association of Ceylon started with demands concerning local applications for land (notably in Uva) and then strongly opposed the proposals of the 3rd report. Their position was that “there is no real shortage of land nor any likelihood of shortage; the fault really lies in the villager’s lack of energy”. To that D.S. Senanayake and D.B. Jayatilaka objected that there was difficulty to find land for village expansion in the wet zone, which was contested by the planter Coombe who insisted that “planters who have bought land and put it in better use than villagers should not be dispossessed for the benefit of village population”. “I consider it a very serious matter, when the commission begins to talk of taking land away from estates and settling it on villagers”. Another planter, E.C. Villiers, affirmed that “we have never seen cases where villagers have actually been stranded, they still keep their paddy fields and they still have a certain amount of chena land round their villages, but they apparently prefer work in the neighboring estates to the precarious livelihood they make out of their own land”, while Coombe admitted that “there are villages in certain parts of the country where all the surrounding land has been sold” but that it did not justify a general policy of land redemption for villagers. Clarke, another planter, tried to prove that plantations and villages can ‘advance side by side’, taking the case of Uva where villagers worked on estates and increased the productivity of their paddy fields at the same time: “It is not a case of turning the villager into a coolie, he works for a part of his time on the estates and devotes the rest to the development of his own land (…) Are you going to penalize estates for the increase of population in the villages?” The deputation considered that the government should compel the villagers to develop their lands: “If the owner does not care to develop it, he ought to be dispossessed (…) we regard the land as an asset of the colony, and anybody not making proper use of it must be prepared to hand it over to someone who will.” Incidentally, a remark made by D.S. Senanayake during the session showed that the anti-Indian sentiments of the Sinhalese elite so conspicuous during the next decade predated the great depression: he proposed that financial aid from a State bank would be offered to the indigenous population but that Indians (notably enriched head kanganies) should be excluded to avoid attracting more Indians to the island “competing with bona fide villagers (…) There will be competition between Indians and middle-class Ceylonese” Opposing this position, the planters defended the principle that Indians were British citizens as well as Ceylonese.

The legal firm of De Sarams represented by Leslie de Saram gave evidence on 11.05.1928, on the Mahawalatenne affair at Waleboda, mentioning that there was a lot of bickering between the Ratwatte heirs. Jayatilaka then raised the question of litigation between private parties after settlement and De Saram confirmed that “As soon as the Crown is eliminated the field is clear for the speculator”. The question of the bona fide villager transforming the chena into a garden is then raised as opposed to the case of chena cultivation with the intention of asserting title against the Crown with a view to sale to outsider, and Madawela rehearses his theory of paraveni chena lands “there are well defined chena lands which are periodically cultivated as a matter of fact”

Next came the deputation of the Sabaragamuwa planter’s Association (A.W. Ruxton, L.B. de Mel, D.M. Berry, A.E.H. Trimer), who asked for the acceleration of settlement and land sales with a settlement officer under their control. The discussion then opposed the planters who stated (with veiled satisfaction) that the villagers no longer cultivated chenas which did not pay and preferred work on estates and having a small garden, and the Ceylonese members (Wickramanayake and Jayatilaka) who objected to “driving the villagers into estates as coolies only without any land” and insisted that “the villagers must be given chenas”. De Mel insisted on speedy settlement or even no settlement at all: “The man who opens up the land will take the risk (…) What is the objection to a portion of a very large area being alienated to and being planted by anybody who is willing to spend the money?” Jayatilaka and Wikramanayake denounced land speculation at the cost of the villager, “who cannot fight the capitalist when he is backed by the chief headman. That is what we are out to prevent”.

The session of 27.06.1927 heard the deputation of the Low Country Products Association, led by H.L. De Mel and C.E.A. Dias, who pleaded for “a complete alteration of the system of Crown land sales” in order to release more lands for development, in small and large blocks; the idea being that it would provide employment to the neighboring villagers, who would in their turn open small holdings – a trickle-down effect.  The long exchange of arguments during these two sessions revealed the rift between the Goyigama-Buddhist minded Ceylonese such as D.B. Jayatilaka, a staunch defender of paddy cultivation and idealized village life, and the big Karawa capitalist minded Ceylonese planters, such as L.B. De Mel, insisting that “paddy cultivation cannot be carried out on a business basis”. The interests of the big Ceylonese planters were the same as those of the British planters and the section of the colonial administration which backed them, while the position of the nationalist leaders converged with that of the reformist administrators: witness the evolution towards land reformism of D.S. Senanayake, who in the early 1920s was supporting the planters interests and changed his mind as a result of his experience as a member of the Land Commission.[27]  

A more radical position was defended before the commission by Kandyan representatives, who denounced the ‘hemming-in’ of the villages by the big estates up country, and the land grabbing activities of outsiders, specifically Muslim traders and enriched kanganis (estate foremen of Indian origin)[28]. H.W. Mediwaka, the English educated son of a chief headman of Bintenna, member of the staff of Trinity College, socially minded, gave a very long evidence on two sessions. He had made a study of ‘low-caste’ villages near the ancient capital Gampola,  surrounded by estates which came close to the paddy fields: “the estates thus formed a ring round the villages, cutting off the villagers from the unopened lands beyond the estates” “I found that there was practically no room between the paddy fields and the estate, even for the purpose of building houses. Houses were often in a string one by the other, and the coolie lines were often shoved right into the center of village properties”. A tank was included: “every part of its bed was now covered with rubber trees”.  “Under the old system of government, if the property was confiscated from a Kandyan it was given to another Kandyan. Now the position is different when it comes to chena lands; it is granted that the government has a right to sell the land to anybody it likes, the land goes out of the hands of the Kandyans, the Tamil kangani maybe comes in and buys the land”. Mediwaka asked for the possibility in the case of necessity for Government to redeem land sold to outsiders, accusing the settlement system set up by the Ordinance of 1897 to have made the tenure of lands insecure with the result that the Kandyans have sold their lands before settlement instead of risking confiscation: “speculators realizing this position make the most of the situation”

According to a memorandum presented to the Commission by the ‘Kandyan National Assembly’ (“Land policy in the Kandyan kingdom”, by M.B. Galagoda), there was no Crown land at all, since the gabadagam had been sold, the nindagam and koralegam belonging to the people and the Crown had no right to sell the highlands of the people. “The government of H.M. sold most part of the forest and chena lands, which formed part of the purappadu [reserved for the increasing population] and malapalu [devolved on the state as the result of extinction of families] lands to foreigners at nominal prices on the plea of developing the country and used the money realized in opening roads and building bridges for the purpose of enhancing the value of the properties so sold”. The memorandum denounced the arbitrary confiscation of Temple lands and the appropriation of chenas of koralegam, and “suggested that all land alienated to foreigners by Government within village boundaries will be repurchased by government and set apart to the gam to which they originally belonged” and that the laws prohibiting the sale of land to outsiders be enforced. [29]

The critical reactions of the colonial administration[30]

The Revenue officers who were asked to comment on the proposals of the Commission were generally critical. Some of them held views similar to those of the planters: Hobday, Assistant Government Agent at Kägalla, minimized the situation of landlessness: “In the district, the great majority of villagers have land in spite of extensive alienations. In the more remote parts of the district, especially in the Peak Wilderness country the villagers would be greatly benefitted from the opening out of a few large estates. 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. One cannot but suspect that where commissioners speak of ‘peasant proprietors’ they have in mind a type which does not exist in Ceylon and has never existed. 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”. Regarding the proposed sale of land to middle class Ceylonese: “I fail to see why this class should receive preferential treatment. My experience is that they know very well how to look after themselves. They have indeed been concerned in some of the worst cases of land grabbing (…) The benefits derived from contact with ‘men of culture and position’ are apt to be obscured when the middle class proprietor lives in Colombo and his estate is left in charge of a Tamil conductor”. And regarding prescription as regard to chena “there would be great danger of some influential person possessing himself of communal land by this means to the detriment of the very class which the commissioners are most concerned to protect”.

The Assistant Agent at Puttalam, Wadia (of Indian origin), held similar opinions: “Chena land alienation has in my opinion been entirely beneficial to the villager. He has obtained a price albeit small, for something which did not belong to him, and the value of the ancestral land retained by him has increased by leaps. The capitalist has brought the village within the confines of civilization for better or for worse, and has introduced the seed from which all may grow the flower (…) The abolition of the paddy and grain tax constituted in the opinion of many a setback to agriculture in this country. Ceylon is probably the only country in the world which has no land tax and the question of its re-imposition on the basis of the value of the land and not its annual production is worthy of favorable consideration”. The Assistant Agent at Nuwara Eliya, Wooley, while recognizing the situation of landlessness especially in Kotmale, considered that “the only solution is for them to obtain employment on estates where there is ample work and pay is good. Hundreds of them do so and have done so for years. But recently they have got the idea that government is giving land away to all and sundry and I have been inundated with applications. The usual plea is that they are poverty stricken with large families, and have no land to build a house and cultivate. I sympathize with their desire to have a home but I see no reason why they should not work on estates”

The Settlement officers were less critical than their Revenue counterparts, but they had practical objections based on their field experience. Archibald, acting Settlement officer, considered that the recognition of the property of chenas on the basis of prescription did not correspond with the conception of the peasant: “A man does not say: ‘I claim Batahena because I had a chena there five years ago’. What he says is “Batahena lies within the boundaries of my pangu. My father claimed 1/24th share of the pangu. Therefore I claim 1/24th of all the chenas in the pangu”.  He also questioned the legal form suggested for settlement, that of a decision by the settlement officer open to an appeal, instead of a deal between the claimant and the Crown representative. His colleagues Hunter and Hughes objected to the definition of the appurtenances on a 3 to 1 basis: in the view of villagers, only pillewas and owitas were appurtenant to paddy fields, but the chenas  were claimed independently from the paddy fields and often by people who had no paddy fields at all “one might as well say that the chenas are appurtenant to gardens”. “One does find the whole future of a village has been prejudiced in the past by recognizing the rights of individuals to chenas (…) Settlement of a village on a 3 to 1 basis is often a jigsaw puzzle without any further scheme to provide for”.

Regarding the possibility to distribute inalienable land in new colonies, their colleague Bassett was skeptical, fearing that “the great majority of Kandyan peasants will not consistently work their lands (…) After an enthusiastic start, the villager gets tired of keeping his cultivation in order” “It has been my experience that after settlement quite 50% of the villagers immediately make every effort to sell the land to which they have got good title to capitalists, usually rich men from Panadure or Kalutara”. “In settled villages, villagers unable to sell their new settlements are going to live in their new lands and selling their old gardens to capitalists. In unsettled villages, now that speculative sale of chena land is prohibited, villagers are selling old gardens and even fields to capitalists. In villages under settlement, villagers sometimes cannot pay for their settlements, however low the rate is charged. They therefore as they are not allowed to sell the land settled upon them, either allow the settlement to lapse, or sell an old garden to pay for it”.

The testimony of Mideniya Adigar (1867-1931), the chief headman who had closely collaborated with the British administration in the Kägalla district, and was himself involved in land speculation, is of special interest; he was backed by his son in law Francis Molamure, the elected representative of the district at the Legislative council[31]. In a letter and in his further evidence before the Land Commission, he described the colonial land policy in the Kägalla district as particularly permissive and developed arguments similar to those of P.F. Ondaatje, the lawyer of the land speculators, who fought in the 1920s against the presumption in favour of the Crown in the matter of highland property, adopting the notion of paraveni chenas developed by Madawela. According to him, in the past there had never been government interference in former gabadagam (royal villages) and koralegam (freehold villages “entirely owned by private persons”) with chena cultivation in all cases where lands were under cultivation within 20 years; only chenas cultivated with hill paddy were taxed,  and ordinance of 1840 required the production of wattoru (tax receipts) before the Crown could admit claims of private ownership, except for registered temple lands and nindagam (feudal villages) whose lords could prove their right to the soil by sannas or other grants by the authorities. The other highland grains were not taxed and it was customary to consider they covered an area two or three time that of hill paddy. On this basis the administration liberally distributed Certificates of quiet possession: as the paddy tax had been abolished no wattoru were being issued after 1892 and the ordinance of 1840 could no longer be enforced. But with the implementation of the new Waste Lands Ordinance of 1897 by the Land settlement department “the Crown now claims those chenas which absolutely belong to villagers (…) There is no Crown chena, if you read all those things you will see that there is no Crown land, no villager would go and take any land of over 20 years growth, because they were presumed to be the property of the Crown (…) How can Government now claim chena lands which are of about 10 or 12 years growth? (…) Even after the Waste Lands Ordinance was brought into operation, Mr. Hill never took a chena land of under 20 years growth, they are all village lands (…) All chena lands are private property”.  Mideniya added: “The villagers in the wet zone do not now cultivate chena lands for chena produce as before. They are as a matter of fact cultivating permanent produce (…) The villagers may be allowed to open up the paraveni chenas on unsettled lands as heretofore. The policy of government is to go back to the land”.

A minority of members or former members of the colonial administration took the side of the peasantry. In the previous decade, the Settlement officer Fraser had opened the way to a reconsideration of the peasant use of the land and the practice of chena cultivation, and some of his successors, such as Stace and Sandys, had followed.  Two influent and controversial individuals  played a role at the time of the Land commission: a former Revenue officer, Freeman, and a visionary administrator, Brayne, who was to become the first Land commissioner in the next decade.

In defense of the peasantry: Freeman and Brayne.

Herbert Rayner Freeman (1864-1945) joined the Ceylon Civil Service in 1885 and retired in 1919, deciding to remain in the island instead of going back ‘home’; his last post was at Anuradhapura and he chose to run for the seat of representative of the North Central province in the Legislative council in 1924 and was continuously reelected until his death; he was very popular in his constituency and assertive as parliamentarian. He developed before the Commission a view of the history of land policy in the North western province, showing its lack of continuity[32]: “I have been connected with land matters in this country since 1885. Between 1886 and 1889 in the Kurunegala district. There chena lands were going into coconuts on a large scale and settlement was very much in advance of surveys – by settlements I mean encroachments. A feature in those days was the considerable number of lands regarded under the 1840 ordinance as encroachment because they were just going out of jungle and being planted up with coconuts (…) In those days the ‘appurtenance’ claims were well known and recognized (…) The difficulty was to make surveys, the department always said that it had too much work to make speculative surveys.  The upset price was 10 Rs an acre, later it went up to 15 Rs and lands were sold readily, numbers of best lands in the Kurunegala district were sold at this price (…) In circulars of April and August 1886 by Sir Arthur Gordon, there was an extension in the favour of the subject of the 8th section of ordinance 12 of 1840, the circulars made clear the intention of Government to settle with encroachers and not to eject them (…) Between 1889 and 1906 there was a period when a considerable number of Certificates of quiet possession for large areas of land were granted (…) on the payment of 2 Rs 5 an acre as survey fees (…) When I returned in 1906 to Kurunegala, I found that all land matters were being dealt with on a notice, the author of which was believed to be Mr. Ellis; the Government agent was directed to call on chief headmen to supply lists of lands planted with any permanent cultivation since 1890 (…) Well, the notice was unfortunately unsigned and it was undated and was stuck up in gansabhava and other buildings, on trees and various places, and difficulties of working it arose (…) There was a very great confusion about the matter, both in 1886 and 1906. Nobody knew which were actually Crown land, or which were private or appurtenances, or what are called paraveni chenas”. Freeman gave  an example of the confusion: if a villager had instead of fine grain planted coconuts (even which did not grow) on his land he was ordered to pay 20 Rs an acre, and was prosecuted and acquitted; Ellis then said he should have been dealt with under the Ordinance of 1897 and not of 1840: “Owing to the form of the notice of Ellis, it caused great confusion and ill feeling, and finally led to the public meeting of 1906 or 1907”.

In the dry areas of the North Western and in the North Central province, the restrictive land policy had catastrophic results: “Government Agent after Government Agent has given the people of the North Central province the character of the most law-abiding people in the island. How is it that they have become law breakers in the matter of their food supply? There is a very tragic misunderstanding of villages of the dry zone, because hardly anyone goes to the villages in these days of railways and motorcars (…) if you penetrate into jungles and hamlets and see the physical state of people you are very much struck by this assertion that these people are habitual law breakers in respect of chenas”.

Charles Valentine Brayne[33] (1877-1964) was the elder brother of Frank Lugard Brayne (1882-1952), member of the Indian Civil Service, author of ‘The remaking of village India” (1929), who came under criticism by his pairs and became the anti-hero of a study by Clive Dewey of the flaws of the Indian Civil Service, who painted him as a perfect Utopian led by a sort of missionary zeal. Charles Valentine was also considered by some as a visionary, by others as a lunatic, and was despised by his conservative colleagues who nicknamed him ‘Brainless Brayne’. He had entered the Ceylon civil service in 1901 and had been for some time Government Agent at Batticaloa, on the east coast, where he made an experiment at land planning. He apparently had the support of Clifford, who nominated him to the Legislative Council, but was strongly opposed by a majority of his colleagues. He was however able to extend his experiments to other districts as additional Controller of Revenue in 1927, supported by some of the Ceylonese members of the Legislative Council, and finally obtained for himself the creation of the post of Land Commissioner.  

C.V. Brayne had developed his ideas in a number of reports and memoranda, which have been bequeathed to the Cambridge South Asian archive. The most exhaustive document is an undated memorandum, ‘The protection of the village’, which is worth quoting:[34]

“Everyone will admit that in parts of the country under rapid development in rubber and other economic products, there is a danger of the village disappearing and the villager becoming landless. This has been put down by some to the Government selling land to capitalists without sufficient forethought for village requirements. This may have occurred in certain cases. There is however another far more potent factor at work, and one which presents a more complicated problem: Government has now ceased to alienate land to capitalists, except after the most careful precautions to safeguard the future needs of the villagers; the problem of the landgrabber has not however been solved.

Let us endeavor to analyze the trouble a little further. In most Kandyan districts, the villagers claim certain chenas in the village. These claims may in certain localities be communal, but in others become with time individual. Certain individuals claim certain areas. Definition of boundaries may be little vague, but the claims are individual. Under the strict letter of the law, ordinance 12 of 1840, the majority of these claims cannot be sustained. In actual practice the policy of Government has been as an act of grace to admit such claims as at least giving a right to purchase the land preferentially at a figure much below its actual market value.

Now, what has been the practical result of the Government’s policy and who has in the main profited? In many places, the land grabber has forestalled the settlement officer, bought up the villager’s right for a song, and in many cases planted the land. He is already there when the settlement officer arrives, and claims that the land be admitted as his private property or sold to him, at a low preferential rate. Now what the land grabber has actually done, I would submit, what were really rights to chena, that is the right to take a chena crop off the land at certain intervals which we may take at an average of ten years – he has translated these rights into rights to the permanent exclusive ownership of the soil, and pocketed the difference in value, we will say in good many times 9/10th. Naturally, land grabbing is an extremely lucrative operation, and there are many in the field.

The problem is: how can this sort of things be prevented and the villager’s interests be protected? It is obvious he cannot protect himself. In fact he is often for motives of a little temporary gain the chief agent in the ultimate destruction of his village. The present development is widespread and in the destruction of the village most mischievous. The remedy to be effective must be drastic.

Survey and settlement must necessarily be a slow process, they cannot, as at present carried out, be greatly expedited. However much they are quickened up, the land grabber will always be there first. Some quicker process is necessary to forestall him.

If ordinance 12 of 1840 could have been enforced for all it was worth, and the last pound of flesh exacted in the interest of the Crown, the present land-grabbing could never had gone on. The kernel of my suggestion therefore is that the presumptions of this ordinance should be tightened up, strengthened and further defined and exacted to the full, not in the interest of the Crown, but in the interest of the village. Let us consider how this could be done.

My proposals with regards to presumption would include:

– the differentiation by law of chena rights and absolute rights of ownership of the soil, the former should not by any number of years of exercise be capable ever of being transmuted into the latter; although there might be difficulty in introducing this principle in the low country where prescription against the Crown is permitted, yet there seems to be no difficulty with regard to Kandyan provinces where prescription against the Crown is not permissible;

– no right to the ownership of the soil should be admitted except on proof a/ that the land is covered by a sannasa b/ that it has been permanently occupied by plantation for a 1/3rd of a century or c/ that it has explicitly been admitted by the Crown to be private property;

– that chena rights to any area can be commuted either by the village or the claimant for rights of absolute ownership to 1/10th of the area, or an equivalent payment in money, that is the village will be able to commute the rights of or buy out land grabbers on this basis;

– some provision would have to be made permitting more lenient treatment of persons who had bona fide acquired and improved land before the introduction of the ordinance.

My second proposal is that in unsettled villages, mapping-out should be carried as quickly as possible. The best method for doing his will to a certain extent have to be determined by actual experiment. The object aimed at would be to determine what land is reasonably required for village purposes, expansion in dwelling compounds and for permanent cultivation in small holdings, chena cultivation, pasturage, timber and so on. This area whether actually claimed by villagers or not, and considering the question of needs rather than the question of rights, would be definitely determined; in certain cases more than one village might conveniently be included in the area, area roughly defined by natural boundaries. It would not be necessary to wait for a survey if one had not yet been made. The area then be proclaimed as a protected village area under the ordinance. As soon as this had been done, the presumption would automatically come into effect, and all forest, chena, waste and unoccupied or uncultivated land would be presumed to be village land. I might suggest that Mr. Dawson, Mr. Archibald and myself should provisionally map out a few villages for the consideration of the commission.

The Government agent would be given power to protect village land as he has now to protect Crown land. Encroachment on village land would be punishable as a criminal offence. The Government agent as trustee of village rights should be given power to notice any person clearing or planting to stop further operation and produce evidence of his title. If not satisfied with the title he might make an order forbidding further operation or occupation of the land. Disobedience would be punishable by a Police court which would make final order for the ejection of the person pending proof of his title in a civil court.

 [Among practical measures] provision be made that land allotted to villagers or purchased by them from the village for individual permanent occupation might be given on a restricted tenure and registered to prevent alienation to outsiders” (…)

Towards a new land policy

A new policy was the outcome of the suggestions of the Land Commission, in a political and economic context transformed by the simultaneous advent of limited self-government based on universal suffrage, and of the economic depression affecting the planting industry. This new context accelerated a complex process which was outlined before the crisis: it combined a new conception of the role of the State in land matters – dispenser and planner, and a nationalist ideology aimed at village reconstruction and restoration of a self-supporting peasantry.

The first stage was to create a new administrative mechanism to supervise or eventually replace the existing practice of the Revenue officers. On 6.10.1927, the Land Commission addressed to the Colonial Secretariat a request to create a Land department, separate from the Revenue administration, headed by a Commissioner with a rank equal to that of the Controller of Revenue, arguing that it could undertake the collection of information to prepare an experiment at ‘mapping out’ selected villages in order to protect them from speculation and the inroads of outsiders[35]. The legal and theoretical basis of such a program was “the presumption to forest, waste chenas, etc., which now operates in favor of the Crown, should operate in favor of the village community, that is the settlement would proceed not on the basis of the Crown versus individual claimants. Within such areas it might be necessary to buy out the claims of outside purchasers to undeveloped land necessary to the well-being of the village. Land would be settled on village claimants on the new peasant tenure already provisionally approved by the Commission (…) What the Commission has chiefly in mind is the mapping out of unsettled villages, particularly in the Kandyan districts”. In a confidential minute of 13.02.1928, the acting governor (Fletcher) approved the creation of a Land commissioner but he was opposed at the Executive Council by senior Government Agents, especially Thaine (Western province) who argued that they had a superior knowledge of land matters – the same argument which was used against the Land settlement department two decades earlier.

On 11.05.1928, C.V. Brayne produced a confidential memorandum to explain what he had in mind; he began with a radical critique of “the old policy of application survey and sale or lease by public auction (…) The interests of the villager has in many cases been overlooked. The person desirous of developing land has naturally chosen the best land for himself and this was in a majority of instances the land immediately joining the village. The land was eventually alienated to him. The proximity of an estate stimulated in the villager too the desire to improve land in economic products and also put the necessary money into his pocket to enable him to do so. There was however by this time no land available as it had all been taken by the bigger man. The village was in fact hemmed-in, with no room to expand (…) In the alienation of land for economic products, the policy of government has been practically one of hand to mouth. The consideration whether land  could or could not in the interest of the villagers be alienated had to be considered by the Revenue officer under the pressure of urgent demand for land (…) In many cases he was compelled to depend upon the report of a chief headman  which may have been sound but in many cases was not” Then he explains his ‘alternative policy’ in anticipation of demand for land and preliminary to development and insists that “it is beneficial both to the villager and the capitalist”.

The comments on Brayne’s memorandum were very critical, even if some Revenue Officers recognized the problem, for example Walters in Uva: “Applications from outsiders to open land near villages are in many cases strongly opposed by villagers (…) Mapping out is wanted (but) the Government Agent is unable to find time for such a work (…) it should be done by the Settlement department”. Hodson (North Western province) was highly skeptical: “I am not aware that anyone seriously contemplate the gigantic task of setting right the mistakes of the past by the only possible method, viz: acquisition of land from estates and their re-sale to villagers. Mapping out before survey is putting the cart before the horse” “I do not consider the appointment of Mr. Brayne would be in the best interests of the colony (…) His policy tends too much to extremism, I think, faddism, for it to be safe to entrust to him the land policy of the island”. Hobday (Kägalla) considered that “to anyone familiar with local conditions, the outstanding fact is the great prosperity of the country rendered possible only by the land alienation of the last 50 years”. For Archibald, the Settlement officer, “these projects appear to be in the region of experiment”. The only enthusiastic supporter was Sandys, a former assistant settlement officer, now posted as Revenue officer at Matara: the project would remedy “the evils of the old system of laissez-faire in land matters”. The experience of mapping out started by his predecessor A.N. Strong in the Matara district, with a system of preferential leases, was positive and “intensely popular”. “As a rule, the villager is perfectly content to work on the tea or rubber land of others so long as he has his own small patch of native garden to build a house and settle on. It is clear however that progress will be slow and difficult without the assistance of large estates. I find that where these are in existence, the population has increased by leaps and bounds, while where they are absent, the increase is very slight. Apart from the employment they create, they alone have the capital to build metaled roads and drive back the jungle with its swarms of wild elephants and leeches that makes colonization so difficult”

To answer these remarks, Brayne produced another confidential memorandum (‘Note for the use of the Parliamentary undersecretary of State for the colonies’, 22.06.1928)[36] in which he recalled that the grief of the Kandyans re. the working of the Waste Lands Ordinance expressed in Council was at the origin of the Land Commission. He criticized the “haphazard and spasmodic development” resulting from private initiative: “the survey maps show the total lack of method in the survey of alienated Crown land during the last 80 years”. Admitting the temporary and tentative nature of his project, he insisted on the importance to start a mapping out experiment in Uva, and alluded to “certain obvious handicaps” he was encountering. On 19.10.1928, the Executive council, presided by the new Governor, Stanley, finally approved the proposed experiment, “work to be done by the Revenue officer under supervision of Brayne”, and two special Assistant Government Agents (Tennyson and D.B. Seneviratne) were entrusted to undertake mapping out in Uva.  

‘Mapping out’ and ‘village reconstruction’: the first experiments.

The idea of village development planning became popular in the 1930s but its origins can be traced to the first Settlement officers. In 1901 Fraser wrote: “In the rear of the Settlement officer should certainly come an officer to decide what land is to be sold, and what made into reserved and village forest. It is practically useless to declare land the property of the Crown, unless some use is to be made of them (…) If this is not done, the villagers will say: formerly we were allowed to chena these lands, but now government although it makes no use of them, refuses to allow us to cultivate them”. The concept of land development was already present in the reflections of Fraser in 1907: “The people were a miserable lot, spoilt by unlimited opportunities of chena. In several cases, I found coconut gardens allowed to go to ruin (…) It is rather too much to expect a villager of the type of this part of the country to observe the present regulations for obtaining land. He has to travel to Hambantota, to fill up a form of application always done through a petition drawer, and has to deposit his rupees with the prospect of having the lot put up for sale in 2 or 3 years, when he may get it ; or if as is probable any other bidders are about he may not, if he still wants land he can get his fees back and repeat the performance with another piece of land (…) It is no wonder he prefers to take what he wants and pay when he is found out. The remedy is for Government to every four or five years cut up a piece of land declared Crown into garden lots and to regularly advertise them once a year as near as possible to the village”[37].

The man who formalized the principle of ‘mapping-out’ was C.V. Brayne. After the settlement of individual claims, its principle was to reserve the remaining Crown lands to specific needs of the village community. The 3 to 1 system which recognized common property of paraveni chenas was in contradiction with the mapping out principle because it left practically no Crown land available for planning. The Settlement department as such was not in charge of the program but its knowledge of the village needs was a great asset to guide the work of the village planners. The Land Commission entrusted Brayne in September 1927 with the task to experiment the system he had proposed, against the will of the Colonial secretary who considered that the ordinary Revenue administration could do the job[38]. His mission evolved into the creation of a new authority, the Land Commissioner, who supervised these activities (1931) and eventually became empowered to effect mapping out (1934) by the Land Development Ordinance[39].

The first official experiment of ‘mapping out’ in the plantation areas was done by A.N. Strong in the Matara district[40]: “In the report of 1925, attention was drawn to the need for so restricting the alienation of Crown lands, where these were still available, as to provide for the future expansion of the village population and the needs of the middle class people who, under the existing scheme of public auction, are financially unable to make any pretense of bidding against a class of professional land grabbers. As a partial remedy, a scheme has been elaborated with a view to the settlement on preferential terms of landless residents (…) The scheme is very popular. At first numbers of applicants came forward, with some landowner behind them, obviously with a view to subsequent re-sale at a profit, but withdrew on learning that personal residence on the land was an indispensable condition and that neither alienation nor even sub-lease would be permitted (…) Each village is being taken up as fast as time permits and certain extents earmarked for various purposes, first for village expansion and the preferential leases above described, then for village forest reserves for fuel and building, then if land is available, for middle class leases, and finally in the less populated areas, for development on a larger scale by estates or other capitalist concerns (…) There is very little land left (…) and the question arises whether the effects of unrestrained and uneconomic alienation in past years can be remedied by anything but outright expropriation”

Another experiment was made by the Land Settlement Officer Bassett in Epitawala, a village of the Sabaragamuwa district[41]. There was a keen demand for land (66 applications) and in 1926 it was decided to issue leases of ½ acre lots for 99 years with a clause prohibiting sublease, donation, mortgage or sale. In 1928 the colony scheme was effective with lessees building houses and planting rubber, but in the meantime it had been decided to demand a contribution: “From experience gained starting a small colony of Vahumpura people at Epitawala, it appears that in that district at least, it is fatal to the success of a scheme to give the land free under any conditions (…) The colonists do not value land for which they have not paid and consequently make even less effort to cultivate it well. The colonists are regarded and openly laughed at by other villagers as ‘charity people’ unless they have bought their lands. This hits their susceptibility to ridicule very hard and they lose all heart in their work. The price charge may be very small, but any sum protects them from the two foregoing disabilities”.  

Quick enquiries associating Brayne with local Revenue officers were undertaken in December 1927 in the north of the Kägalla district[42], in two groups of villages (Paspolakanda, south of Alawwa and Dambullakanda, north of Rambukkana) whose forested lands had been preserved as fuel reserves for the railway;  in the Nawadun korale of the Ratnapura district where extensive sales of Crown land had taken place; in Magul Otota korale of the North western province; in Hapitigam korale of the Western province; and in Pasdun korale of the Kalutara district, where “among the Goyigama population of these villages, there is a desire to own land, even the smallest share, and be classed as cultivators and not as coolies. Enquiries however elicited that it was very difficult for villagers to buy land at all from the Crown as they were generally outbid by richer people; when they did succeed, the price was very high, running to as much as 600 Rs an acre; under these conditions, villagers were discouraged from applying for land”. But these enquiries led to nothing, for want of official support.

More extensive experiments were started in 1929 in the province of Uva, by a special officer  entrusted with the task, E. Tennison, working under the direction of the Government agent.  They  selected the area between Bandarawela – Haliela – Welimada, which was most congested due to the extension of tea estates and vegetable production. Mapping out the Crown lands was based on statistics of population increase, on the village needs expressed by the villagers assembled and written down, and the characteristics of lands available. The proposals for each village were made public and sketched. Once approval was given by the Controller of Revenue, land was allotted by the administration under the Peasant proprietor system[43].

At the same time, the condition of the peasantry attracted the attention of the young generation of the Ceylonese nationalist elite, like in India, and various unofficial projects and experiments of ‘village reconstruction’ were framed. The career of Wilmot Perera (1905-1973) is exemplary in that respect. Wilmot Perera belonged to an enterprising Karawa family allied with the Dias (A.V. Dias was his uncle) and de De Soysas, who were among the richest Ceylonese plantation owners. He was the son of Mahawaduge Abraham Perera, ‘rubber king’ of Panadura, who made a fortune by contracts with the colonial government and invested in rubber lands, and the grandson of Mathes Perera, an arrack renter. He inherited large estates around Horana when his father died. He first managed them as the other plantation owners, and was involved in the acquisition of chena land from villagers as an intermediary for a local British planter of Horana, Healey (Perth Estate). He confronted the Assistant Settlement Officer Bassett, first refused and but finally accepted his offer of settlement in the village of Paragahamaditta in the Ratnapura district: it seems that he was already conscious of the injury caused to the villagers by the land grabbing activities which were the source of wealth of his class[44].  Then instead of going to England which was the usual cursus in these new rich families, he chose to join Rabindranath Tagore in Bengal at Santiniketan and on his return initiated a replica of Santiniketan on his Horana estate. This led him to ‘discover’ the poverty of rural Ceylon and progressively turned him into a leftist. In 1932 he was still an admirer of D.S. Senanayake to whom he dedicated his book Problems of Rural Ceylon (Colombo, 1932) which gathered papers published in the Daily News, the organ of the anglicized bourgeoisie. He criticized the peasant colonization schemes started by the government in Rayigam korale, near Horana, and   attributed the failures of these experiments and more generally the poor productivity of peasant agriculture to social environment rather than to the supposed laziness of the peasantry ; he blamed the headman system as “the principal limiting factor in the betterment of the peasant” and pleaded for “village reconstruction” through the return to the supposed self-administration of the past and the development of practical education. He convened an All Ceylon Rural Reconstruction Conference at his Horana estate in May 1932, where S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike spoke, and initiated the first socio-economic studies of villages in 1934[45]. The Suriya Mal movement was launched at his residence in Horana in 1933, and this movement evolved into the socialist-trotskyite Lanka Sama Samaja Party, of which Wilmot was a member, He later became parliamentarian and ended his career as Bandaranaike’s ambassador to Mao’s China in 1957.

A new land legislation

In July 1930, the Governor had forwarded to the Colonial office in London a series of four ordinances to replace the existing land legislation (Ordinances of 1830 and 1897) after the Land commission recommendations[46]. A new legislation appeared necessary because the presumption of Crown property of waste lands was challenged and at the same time landlessness was increasing. But the question of chenas was “one of extreme delicacy and admitting only of a solution by compromise” and some of the proposals of the 3rd interim report “especially those dealing with the Kandyan chena problem, were not such as could have been accepted by Government. They were not repeated in the final report which entirely superseded the 3rd interim report (…) A compromise was reached consisting in the maintenance of the law practically unchanged while in the definite instructions of Government the fullest concessions are granted by the Settlement and Revenue officers to all reasonable equitable claims in the Kandyan provinces”. This included “the cases in which the claimants would have been equitably entitled to such settlement had the lands remained chena”. Practically this compromise could allow the settlement on outsiders in terms similar to those offered to villager, contrary to the regular practice of the department. Finally there was an urgent need to validate these measures because “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”.

The new State Council set up by the Donoughmore Constitution respected the compromise, but decided to reform the administrative system on the lines suggested by Brayne, who had gained the support of D.S. Senanayake: a Land Commissioner (Brayne) replaced the Controller of Revenue for land matters, communicated directly with the Settlement Officer and with the Government Agents, and served as counsellor for the Ministry of Agriculture, which was attributed to Senanayake. But the new policy was impeded by the economic depression which rendered the plantations unproductive and dried up the demand for land, and by disagreements regarding the forms of tenure and the categories of beneficiaries of allotments.  

It was found in 1934, during the malaria epidemic, that the legal basis for the new land policy was not systematic enough and a new bill was passed by the State Council and reserved for approval by London[47]. Its aim was to protect the villager against the outsider, the local against the general interests; to protect the natural environment; to plan the alienation of Crown land for specific purposes to specific categories of the population; to restrict the alienability of land by a system “which approximates to the tenure which existed in ancient Sinhalese times”; to make it impossible the minute subdivision of shares. Since the passing of the ordinance allowing the preferential alienation of Crown land to middle class Ceylonese [defined as residing permanently in Ceylon and drawing an income of less than 6,000 Rs a year], “considerable extents have been alienated to this class by lease or permit in anticipation of the bill. During the last five or six years large numbers of peasants and small holders have been put upon the land on permits which anticipate the passing of the bill. The extent of land involved is something between 60,000 and 70,000 acres and the number of persons waiting for the grants under the bill runs into many thousands”. The new regulations were opposed by representatives of Indian interests because they proposed a restrictive definition of ‘middle class Ceylonese’ which excluded enriched kanganis who were not considered to be ‘members of the permanent population of Ceylon’. The attitude of the Ceylonese representatives was “stiffened by the fact that the indebtedness of Ceylonese proprietors has during the recent period of economic depression resulted in not a few properties passing into the hands of their Indian creditors.  It may also be noted that the present epidemic of malaria has fallen principally upon the wet zone. It is recognized that the malnutrition of the village population has greatly aggravated the severity of this epidemic and delayed its reversal. This malnutrition cannot but be attributed in some measure to the poverty caused by the scarcity of land in numbers of villages. In these circumstances the attitude of the State Council in the face of possible Indian competition for land can very readily be understood and commands every sympathy”. The minutes of the staff of the Colonial Office on this dispatch show that they are prepared to resist the pressures of India and confront the Indian Office on this issue, which was to become hotly debated during the next five years.

Land policy at the ground level: the case of the Kägalla district (1931-1948)

In the early 1930s, unemployment resulting from the closing down of rubber and coconut plantations, and the pronouncements of political leaders, popularized by the vernacular press, on the reversal of the colonial land policy, led to an explosion of demands for land, especially in the Kägalla district. Landlessness was most acute in that district or at least the consciousness of it was most developed there, if one estimates it by the agitation which spread like a wildfire as soon as the opportunity to obtain land was known in the villages, and continued unabated. Villagers began to help themselves and occupy waste land for chenaing or gardening. The administration was compelled to expedite land redistribution schemes (what was called in the administrative lingo ‘land kacceri’) or simply recognize the fait accompli.

The movement started in Yatiyantota in August 1931 with a petition “to obtain land for chenaing in view of the depression; (…) several wanted lands on terms similar to the terms on which land is given to villagers in the Kalutara district. They had read of it in the Sinhalese newspapers; (…) some of the signatories did not want land for permanent cultivation but asked for leases of small extents of forest for chenaing”. It continued in the Bulatkopitiya area, where the demand for land was most pressing, especially in Welatuduwa and Wegolla, two Duraya villages, where after a limited distribution the beneficiaries cultivated more than they had received. In Uduwe palata, “a large number of villagers turned up and asked for land”. In all these localities, land sales by the Crown and by villagers had been heavy during the previous fifty years, there was very little cultivable land left, work was dependent on rubber tapping and processing, and the possibility of having recourse to chena cultivation in case of need had vanished, but the idea was still there. Near Kitulgala, the villagers helped themselves to 40 acres declared Crown “because there was a proposal to give out part of it under the Peasant proprietor scheme (…) the offenders were called upon to pay compensation and all pleaded poverty. True they are poor people, I [the Assistant Agent] gave them the opportunity of paying a fine of 5 Rs an acre and all agreed to do so”.  In Panawal korale east, there was a pressing demand of land for chenaing “so as to relieve immediate distress (…) the demand for land is so great that it is essential that the Crown should know what land is available for village and other purposes” . With the increasing poverty due to the depression, and administrative slackness, in the Kitulgala area “the villagers were most reluctant to abandon what they had cleared and pleaded they had nowhere else to go. I found some land had been mapped out for village expansion but the proposals to allocate it had fallen through”. The situation was especially severe in Mapitigama in 1934, where “the villagers are hard hit by the low prices of coconuts and rubber, and get very low pay for picking nuts, and there is no work for them on the rubber estates. They are living on one meal a day and appear in need of assistance”; and not surprisingly, this village would be one of the worst hit by the malaria epidemic a few months later.[48]

In Four-korales (the northern part of the district), where the experiments of Paspolakanda and Dambullakanda had taken place in 1928, the rural economy was less dependent on rubber, but the pressure was also very strong. The elected representative, E.A.P. Wijeratne, was open to people’s demands. He proposed a scheme for 600 acres available in Walgam pattuwa: land kacceries were held at Deliwala Walpola and Hewadiwela between October and December 1931: “there were so many deserving cases that it was very difficult to make selection (…) In Dombemada, most of the applicants were burdened with families of six or seven persons, but no land was available to satisfy their needs” In Walgama, “a large number of villagers appeared and stated that they were starving and had no lands; the headman recommended that they be given lands in Dumbarakanda where land had been previously allotted for food production”. In Tismalpola the village forest had to be used as a village expansion area”. But there were complaints by people of other villages who felt discriminated, and in 1933 a campaign of petitions was started: “A very unpleasant spirit in this area (…) poisoned by a virulent mixture of caste and anti-headman feeling”. Another hurdle was indebtedness: “most of the settlers in Walgam pattuwa have mortgaged (informally of course) their crop for year ahead to a local capitalist” The demand for land and the tendency for the more enterprising villagers to help themselves were also apparent in the Aranayake area, where land kacceries had not been organized: “these encroachments are continually taking place as few if any outright sales are allowed”.[49]

The lack of available Crown land, the persisting crisis of the plantation sector, and the growing political awareness of the peasant condition eventually led the authorities to consider acquiring abandoned or poorly managed estates for distribution to the villagers. The first operations were held in the Bulatkopitiya and Aranayake areas, where a population belonging in majority to Duraya castes – Panna, Batgama and Vahumpura, had been specially impacted by land grabbing by estates since the mid 19th century[50]. The first series of acquisitions were contemplated in 1938; they were located in Urumiwela and Tunbage (7.12.1940), 473 acres, where 200 families were given lands; then in Aranayake (17.12.1940, 492 acres, 250 families, then Seaforth estate (3.3.1941), 447 acres, 60 families; and Debatgama (28.9.1943), 144 acres, 152 families. The second series, after the war, comprised Knavesmire (4.12.1945), 777 acres, 326 families; Udagoda (5.12.1945), 496 acres, 49 families; Dickella (17.10.1946), 592 acres, 100 families; and Danagama (7.1.1947), 259 acres, 45 families: the colonists were recruited in specific villages around each colony, which are listed in the document.[51]

The acquisition of Knavesmire estate for village expansion in December 1945 gave birth to a political affair, in a context of tension between Indian and Ceylonese authorities about the status of Tamil migrant workers. The rubber and tea estate had been purchased from the European company by a Kalutara Muslim, Ibrahim Lebbe Marikar Hadjiar, in the early 1940s. The decision by Government to acquire it was taken in January 1944, the purchase was finalized in December 1945. But the Tamil resident workers refused to quit, although they were offered employment in neighbouring estates. They had the support of S. Thondaman, young defensor of the Tamil Indian workers, who was to become their representative in independent Ceylon, when the authorities prosecuted them in the Courts for squatting considering that when the acquisition was decided upon no opposition arose from any quarter, and that residence in an estate was not equivalent to residence in an ancestral village. In a lengthy report, D.S. Senanayake tried to the take-over of the estate and listed the villages which should benefit from the scheme (those which were affected by the land sales at the creation of the estate) : “The Kegalle district is one in which the sale of Crown land to estates and of private land by villagers also to estates has rendered the district particularly short of land for the genuine needs of the villagers (…) The claims of the villagers – genuine villagers – whether they are of the agricultural class or workers in other trades must receive prior consideration. Reference is also invited to the definition of the Ceylonese as a person possessing a Ceylon domicile of origin”. Thondaman contested “that villagers and estate labourers were distinct entities and only villagers were eligible to participate in the scheme” and predicted that “Knavesmire episode is an indication of things to come. The complete amity and good fellowship that exists between the Indian labourers of Knavesmire and the Sinhalese of the neighbourhood should be an object lesson to the protagonists of communalism who are in power today. It is a crying shame that such an amity on which a united nation can be easily built up is being destroyed. Mr. Senanayake would treat estate labourers and villagers living in mutual friendship as two different entities. His officers evidently under his directions are in search of domicile of origin to create division. Their object is that Indian labourers who have for generations contributed to the development of the country should be kept secluded as estate labourers and transferred as such from estate to estate if work is available, or repatriated across or into the sea”.  The controversy dragged on with an attempt to organize a hartal, until Nehru in the name of the Indian National Congress advised Thondaman to drop the matter, and the take-over was completed in 1950. [52]

Politicization of land distribution and poor management of acquired estates became a serious issue in the 1950s. In the words of the Land Commissioner Rajendra testifying before the Land Commission of 1956, land was distributed to all and sundry without method[53]: “the situation is today back it was before the enactment of the ordinance: planned alienation has been abandoned and the land is advertised according to demand”. The encroachments were no longer prevented by headmen who had lost their power and were afraid of the politicians. In 1954, the situation of acquired estates was reviewed in a report by the Assistant Government agent to the Land commissioner, defending the principle but recognizing the shortcomings of the project[54]: “Here in Kägalla, where every village is hemmed in by major estates, some of them 1000 acres in extent, the problem is an extremely difficult one. Every acquisition or proposal carries in its train objections, not only from the owners of estates, but also from certain other interests who review the question of land merely from loss or gain of income and not also from considerations of humanity. I do not think I exaggerate when I say that at least 50% of land in Kägalla belongs to uninterested outsiders, the majority of whom are foreigners. Lands which were normally chenas and available for the people have in the last 75 years disappeared and we have the strange situation of people whose traditions are rooted in the soil of Kägalla for hundreds of years, either having to starve, or having to be pulled out of Kägalla. This therefore is the strongest case for the acquisition of estates for village expansion purposes. (…) One might quite fairly point out that while Government sees with great caution and fear the dangers of the devastation of natural assets by alienation to villagers, it apparently viewed with equanimity till very recently a similar situation, where moneyed people, educated and not in want, do exactly the same thing in respect of estates they purchased under the normal system. I make bold to say that in this country there has been a greater loss of original assets on account of such people than were one to total up all the land that has been acquired and divided up among the villagers”.

According to the report of 1954, the results of the project varied according to the method of distribution and management of the lands. A category included estates acquired for alienation in small blocks, under village expansion schemes according to the Land development ordinance, with an allowance paid for house building: “the people were left to fend for themselves either to maintain their cultivation or to ruin it (…) for a short spell, the allotees enjoyed prosperity by eating into the capital of the land, and thereafter they reached a stage of poverty similar to that in which they were previously”. This group comprised Aranayake-Welhella-Rahala; Urumiwela-Tunbage; Seaforth; Malmaduwa; the program failed to do any progress in Debatgama (“utter unsuitability of this land for cultivation”).  The second group of acquired estates was to be run collectively: Kurundewatte/Fairfield, Digana/St Peters, Udagoda, Danagama, Dickella Colony, Mahakanda, and the rubber section of Knavesmire: there was no loss of capital nor income in that case, and the author pleaded for that solution against the criticism of those who considered that only company management could run efficiently a modern plantation. 

The detailed files on proposals of acquisition and on actually acquired estates are available in the Kägalla kacceri and show the extent of political patronage involved[55]. Some acquisitions were proposed by the Ministry of Agriculture or the Prime minister (D.S. Senanayake himself at Hunugala) or by parliamentarians (N.H. Keerthiratne in the area of Rambukkana); some by their proprietors (Mount Prospect); in many cases, petitions originated from enterprising villagers (such as N.W. Gunasekara of Pondape) or from rural development societies (as in Uduwe). Some estates were the property of big firms such the Grand Central Rubber Co., a few belonged to temples; but most medium size estates were more or less abandoned by non-residing owners who had purchased them from Chettiar creditors during the depression, often Moors or Karava businessmen of Colombo, or Burghers lawyers (Ondaatje in Godapola). The case of Berawila, one of the oldest estates above Aranayake, 360 acres, the opening of which we have recounted in a previous study[56], is worth quoting. In a petition dated 16 July 1949, residents of Aranayake, Pondape, Arama and Deiyanwela, wrote: “We are exceedingly poverty-stricken people, who have no land of our own even for cultivation and earn our living by working as laborers and cultivators. In these days of high cost of living we are unable to maintain with a poor coolie pay. Our children are underfed and subjected to suffering of illness”. The proprietors were O.L.M. Ahamed Abdullah and other of Norris road, Colombo, who wrote: “this land was purchased by us from a member of the Chetty community in the year 1946 for the sum of Rs 140000”: they were ready to sell it to Government because it was not remunerative.

The Kandyan peasantry commission of 1949-1950

Immediately after Independence, the government headed by D.S. Senanayake decided to set up a new commission to enquire into the condition of the Kandyan peasantry. It is quite significant that this commission focused on the Central and Uva provinces, excluding the North Western and Sabaragamuwa provinces: its underlying aim was to blame the British land policy in the tea districts for the decline of the Kandyan peasantry, while ignoring the impact of rubber and coconut plantations on the no less Kandyan peasantry of the mid-country[57]. The general tone of the report (dated 28.02.1951) blames the colonial system in general, the foreign plantation development and the two land ordinances of 1840 and 1897 in particular, for the situation of the Kandyan peasantry: “Apart from the direct appropriation of village land under these two ordinances, these laws were also indirectly responsible for much of the village lands being alienated by the villagers themselves. The presumption in favor of the Crown created by these ordinances led to a great degree of uncertainty among the peasantry as to their titles to their chena lands. As a result the peasantry sold what they regarded as doubtful title to speculators from other areas” (p. 73). Alienation of Crown land was systematically done in favour of planters, European and Low Country, and when the Settlement department was set up, its working was too slow, even after 1931when it was reinforced. The general feeling of the Kandyan witnesses (most of them belonging to the Goyigama-Radala class) was that of loss of land[58]. The registration of Temple lands led to temple domains being leased out to plantations and plantations or traders as successors of tenants paying a paltry sum in lieu of services. The danger of a loss of identity was specially feared by them: “these once proud and independent people were driven to a life on estates to be herded like cattle and to be made to work under a kangani from the coast”[59]. The theme of the ‘hemmed-in’ village was omnipresent: “a century of British administration had left behind hundreds of plantation-locked villages rigorously restricted to their paddy lands (…) the peasants were imprisoned in their villages” (pp. 71, 73). Landlessness was general and the solutions are difficult to find: “It is necessary to steer a middle course between national economic chaos that would result from a general break-up of the estates on one hand, and the perpetuation of a landless peasantry on the other” (p. 337). The report denounced discrimination in favour of the plantations in the matter of health, education and other public investments; destruction of village society under the impact of capitalism and land speculation; ecological impact, especially the drying of sources, silting of paddy fields from drains, and earth slips especially in Kotmale; and finally caste as a factor of backwardness. But among the memoranda sent by English speaking individuals such as one E. Navaratnam of Atabage one finds the reverse theory of the benefits derived from the estates by the Kandyan villagers (including women) in terms of employment as non-resident or even resident workers.

Uva, and in particular Udukinda, was the object of special attention, as the most depressed area, and the sessions held at Badulla, Bandarawela and Welimada, which were restituted in the form of a diary, are full of useful information at the grass root level.[60] A typical exposition of the hemmed-in representation was given by an upasaka (Buddhist lay devotee): “The Kandyan peasantry in the village are crushed on all sides by forces arrayed against them, Government on one side, estates on the other, and Tamils on top of them (…) Both within village areas and even in Badulla, all government employment is in the hands of outsiders – Tamils, all contracts go to non-Kandyans, the teachers are all outsiders”. The enquiry disclosed the lack of protection, rehabilitation and colonization schemes by the State (as compared for example with Kägalla); the influence exerted by non-Kandyans, especially Moors and Tamil kanganis; the situation of villagers settled on estates or going out to work in the risk of losing their Sinhalese identity, and the general lethargy prevalent in the villages. The abolition of rajakariya had deprived the villagers of the numerous temple village of their access to chena and pasture lands, which had been leased out to plantations, notably in the case of Raja Maha Vihare lands of Ketakele (near Welimada), which had been ‘acquired’ by Luckyland and Albion estates. This general picture of decline and abandonment is linked by the educated witnesses (typically Buddhist-nationalists) with the repression of the insurgencies of 1818 and 1848, and with the impact of the harsh extorsion of the grain taxes in the 1880s: “the village of Ketakele was specially neglected by the British as a punishment for their intense loyalty to the Kandyan kings”.  Several rural development societies of Udukinda gave testimonies which insisted on the lack of space for village expansion due to the proximity of estates, the drying up of streams diverted by estates, the power exerted by outsiders, especially Tamils who obtained Crown lands to develop vegetable cultivation. They reported the situation in the neighborhood of Diyatalawa army camp dominated by Sinhalese mudalalis (Abraham Saibo and A.M. Fernando). The case of Gorandiyakumbura, a low caste village partly absorbed by Aislaby estate, was mentioned as typical of the area: “D.K. Kiripuncha represents that the really landless and needy have great difficulty in obtaining allotments under the Land Development Ordinance. In almost fear and trembling, he suggests that this is due to the village headman being influenced by the well-to-do and upper classes (…) 90 acres of lands reserved for pasture are being almost fully appropriated by Aislaby estate”

*

The land reform laws of the 1970s resulted in the appropriation by the State of around one million acres of both productive and unproductive plantations; out of these lands only about 10 per cent was redistributed to landless villagers. The Land Commission of 1987 estimated that the situation after the reforms was as follows: the State owned in theory 13,347,630 acres (approx. 5,3 millions hectares), that is 82,3% of the total area of the island. The State had alienated between 1935 and 1985 2,052, 987 acres: 20% in the major colonization schemes, 43% for village expansion, 25% for regularization of encroachments (508,000 acres), 6,7% for middle class allotments. Despite the alienation programs, it was estimated that possibly 6% of the total land area had been encroached by about half a million settlers, notably in the Kandyan regions where the Land kacceries had been stopped in the 1970s and the land policy had become much relaxed. Political patronage had become the norm in land allocation. Alienation programs to landless villagers have not created a prosperous peasantry as expected by the first Land commission: “on the contrary the majority of these settlements had become pockets of poverty and areas of social deprivation. Many of them have become centers of turmoil in the current [JVP] crisis”[61].


[1] In Indian Economic and Social History Review XIV (3) July-September 1977, p. 341-362

[2] In Modern Asian Studies 23 (1), 1989, p. 179-207

[3] CO54/903/3 desp. 571, 16.07.1930

[4] ‘Speeding up sales of Crown lands’, SLNA 65 Colonial Secretariat file L362/1926

[5] ‘Alienation of a block of land in Pasdun east and Hinidum pattu’ SLNA 65 Colonial Secretariat files CF77/1926, and CF86/1926; on Dodampitiya, see also SLNA 65 L258/1927

[6] ‘Alienation of pastures in Uva’, SLNA 65 Colonial Secretariat file L2/1927

[7] SLNA 65, Colonial secretariat confidential file CF120/1926 

[8] CO54/886/11. The three annexed documents are ‘Some reflections on the Ceylon land question’ – papers presented to the Second Agricultural Conference (11.03.1927), printed by Cottle, Colombo, 1927; ‘Message by the Governor to the members of the Finance committee’; and ‘Memorandum on Government land Policy submitted for discussion at the Colonial Conference 31.03.1927’, printed as Colonial Office confidential print 386.

[9] Julius Hermann Boeke, Dualistische economie, Leiden 1930

[10] ‘Evidence given before the Land commission in response to the invitation in § 4 of the Third interim report’, Land commissioner department records, file 51 (C/R 1291); also in Land settlement department records, file 216, 2 volumes, including memoranda.

[11] SLNA 65 L62/1928 ‘Reports of the Revenue and Settlement officers containing their comments on the Third interim report of the Land Commission’: these reports were printed in a censored form but never published, for political reasons. See also SLNA LC784/1929 ‘synopsis of criticisms in the Third interim report’

[12] For example: SLNA 65 L309/1928 ‘Memorandum of the Kandyan National Assembly on the Land Commission proposals’; Land Settlement Department Records file 216: Mideniya Adigar to Land Commission, 17.04.1928

[13] Ceylon Sessional Paper 18/1927

[14] SLNA 65 L295/1927; 7.01.1926

[15] Ceylon Sessional Paper 2/1928

[16] 4th report, Sessional paper 5/1928; 5th report SP16/1928; 6th report SP 35/1928, 7th report SP 45/1928, 8th report 1/1929; 9th report SP17/1929

[17] Land settlement department records, file 216 and Sessional paper 16/1928

[18] Sessional paper 18/1928

[19] Times of Ceylon, 15.03.1927, in SLNA 65 L2/1927

[20] In SLNA 65 L2/1927, private letter of A. Wickwar to M. Fletcher, 8.10.1928

[21] SLNA 65 L288/1927 and Land Settlement Department file 216.

[22] SLNA 65 L1198/1927 incl. Executive council minutes of 5.03.1928. Archdale when the department took up the settlement of Nakkavita where he had purchased lands “through an enterprising deed broker, an ex-aracci” retained his arrogant position, saying to the settlement assistant officer (Diary Ingledow, 8.10.1937) “that his knowledge of land laws, thanks to a number of settlements made on him by Certificates of Quiet Possession, was considerably greater than my own”

[23] SLNA, 65 L650/28 minute of the Settlement Officer, 24.10.1928

[24] SLNA 65 L15/29, L780/28, L688/29; On Waleboda, see village file in Temple and ninda lands chapter. The affair dragged on in 1937 (Diary Navaretnam)

[25] SLNA 65 L395/29, CO54/899/13 ‘Sale of land to Grand Central Rubber Estates’

[26] “Evidence given before the Land commission in response to the invitation in § 4 of the Third interim report”, Land commissioner department records, file 51 (C/R 1291); also in Land settlement department records, file 216, 2 volumes, including memoranda.

[27] In the evidence of the Select committee of the Legislative Council on rubber restriction (1925) available in CO54/874, Senanayake criticized the land policy (as implemented by the Land settlement department) which restricted land sales: “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”

[28] On this point, see Eric Meyer, “’Enclave’ plantations, ‘hemmed-in’ villages and dualistic representations in colonial Ceylon”. in E.V. Daniel, H. Bernstein and T. Brass eds, Plantations, Proletarians and Peasants in Colonial Asia, London, Cass, 1992 pp. 199-228.

[29] SLNA 65 L309/1928. On the opposite side, see the testimony of Hyadari, the Agent of the Government of India in Ceylon, and I.X. Pereira, representative of the Indian businessmen: “Indians came to help you (…) now we form a very large section of your middle class, we have lived here for a long time, we have traded with you, yet you have not been crowded by us”

[30] “Reports of the revenue and settlement officers containing their comments on the 3rd Interim Report of the Land Commission” SLNA 65 L62/1928: the original uncensored reports are found here; these reports have been printed in an edited form but have never been published as sessional papers because (as said in the minutes of the colonial staff) such a procedure could have adverse political implications.

[31] Two documents : ‘Letter of Mideniya Adigar to the Land commission on the question of chenas’, 17.04.1928 in Land settlement department records file 216, and ‘Evidence of J.H. Meedeniya on the subject of land settlements in the Kägalla district,’ 11.07.1928 in Evidence given before the Land commission in response to the invitation in § 4 of the Third interim report”, Land commissioner department records, file 51 (C/R 1291). Maduwanwela, Mideniya, Molamure, Ellawala were the main ‘new-radala’ families of the province of Sabaragamuwa who had been given land and titles by the British after the rebellions of 1818 and 1848.

[32] Testimony of H.R. Freeman, 27.06.1928, in “Evidence given before the Land commission in response to the invitation in § 4 of the Third interim report”, Land commissioner department records, file 51 (C/R 1291)

[33] The file SLNA 65 L1054/1928 is entirely devoted to Brayne’s projects ; private copies including his reports on Batticaloa (1925) are also available in Cambridge South Asian Archive, ‘Papers of C.V. Brayne.’ On his brother F.L. Brayne, see Clive Dewey, Anglo-Indian Attitudes, London, 1993

[34] Undated memorandum (1927) in Cambridge South Asian Archive, ‘Papers of C.V. Brayne.’.

[35] SLNA 65 L.1054/28: Letter of 6.10.1927

[36] in Cambridge South Asian Archive, ‘Papers of C.V. Brayne.’

[37] Diary Fraser, 23.11.1901 and 3.03.1907.

[38] See Brayne’s memorandum, SLNA 65 L1054/28, and Administration Report of the Land Settlement Department 1929, p. K4

[39] Administration reports of the Land Commissioner, 1931-1934. In a report sent to London, (CO54/926) mapping out was thus defined : “the systematic allotment of the available Crown land in a given area for various purposes according to the nature of the land and the needs of the community”

[40] Administration report Matara 1926 p. C27

[41] Diary Bassett, 13.10.1926, 2.03.1928, and Report on the 3rd interim report of the Land Commission

[42] Land Settlement Department file 268/2A(216) and Brayne Papers Cambridge South Asian Archive: ‘Notes on mapping out, studies on the Kägalla district, 1.02.1928; SLNA 30, Diary Kägalla December 1927.

[43] In Administration Report of Uva province 1929 p. H9-10

[44] Diary ASO Bassett, 13.09.1927 to 27.10.1927 “His age is 23 and his lawyer looks considerably younger” Wilmot made him understand that ‘If it had been his own business he would have signed [but] Mr J.A. Perera who came with him recited a short resumé of his arguments in the present Neluwana case and to assure me afresh that there was no such thing as Crown chena”.

[45] Wilmot A. Perera, A socioeconomic survey of the Raigam korale, study 1, Colombo, 1934

[46] CO54/903/3, desp. 571, 16.07.1930

[47] CO54/926 Governor to Secretary of State, 31.01.1935 n° 50 (23 pages)

[48] SLNA 30 Diary Kägalla 18.08.31, 18.09.1931, 10.02.1932, 5.02.1932, 15.03.1932, 18.03.1932,17.04.1932, 26.07.1932, 29.01.1934, 20.03.1935.

[49] SLNA 30 Diary Kägalla 5.09.1931, 27.06.1932, 12.09.1932, 21.03.1933, 22.11.1933, 22.10.1934.

[50] On this point, see Eric Meyer, “Landgrabbing by coffee estates in the Kägalla district : mid-19th century case studies” [https://slkdiaspo.hypotheses.org/5090];“Highland Appropriation by the Plantation Sector in the Kägalla District (1870-1930)” [https://slkdiaspo.hypotheses.org/6273] ;“Historical Aspects of Caste in the Kandyan Regions, with particular reference to the non-Goyigama castes of the Kägalla District” Sri Lanka Journal of the Humanities and Social Sciences, 40, pp. 21-54

[51] In 1948, a first assessment of estate acquisitions was done: Kägalla kacceri record room, File LD 180 Schedule of lands already acquired, 3.02.1948; see the entry in the Kägalla diary: 4.05.1938.

[52] On the Knavesmire affair, see the official correspondence with the Colonial Office: CO54/988/4, file 55569/14 and Kägalla Kacceri Land file LK 154 ; the version given by Thondaman (S. Thondaman, Tea and Politics, an Autobiography, vol 2, New Delhi-Colombo, 1994, pp. 26-30) and the article of  V. Samaraweera “Land, Labor, Capital and Sectional Interests in the National Politics of Sri Lanka” in Modern Asian Studies , Volume 15 (1) 1981 p.156-57. History of Knavesmire estate formation is given in my “Highland appropriation…” quoted above. In an interview I had in 1978 with Dr. N.M. Perera, the LSSP leader, he told me: “Knavesmire was not a serious attempt at village resettlement and was engineered by Senanayake to embarrass the LSSP thinking we will take the side of the Tamils”

[53] Development of land alienated from the inception of the Land development ordinance to the end of 1954 in B.H. Farmer papers, Cambridge South Asian Archive

[54] Report by the Assistant Agent Kägalla to the Land commissioner on acquired estates, 13.09.1954 in B.H. Farmer papers, Cambridge South Asian Archive.

[55] Kägalla kacceri record room, Files LD 180 (2 volumes) and 127, especially Udagoda and Dickella

[56] “Landgrabbing by coffee estates in the Kägalla district : mid-19th century case studies” [https://slkdiaspo.hypotheses.org/5090]; see also on this area the monograph of Tamara Gunasekara, Hierarchy and Egalitarianism, Caste, Class and Power in Sinhalese Peasant Society. London, the Athlone Press, 1994.

[57] Report of the Kandyan Peasantry Commission, Ceylon Sessional Paper, Colombo, 1951, XIII- 520 p. The theories developed in the report have been criticized in the 1960s and 70s by historians of the Peradeniya University, notably Michael Roberts, who exposed their nationalist bias. The memoranda sent by various individuals and local societies, often written by teachers on notebooks, most of them in Sinhala, some in the form of village monographs, are kept in the Kandy repository of the National Archives (108/28). They provide a wealth of local information and offer a testimony of the state of mind of the swabasha-educated members of rural society who are going to come into prominence with the Sri Lanka Freedom Party electoral success a few years later in 1956

[58] See for example the memoranda and evidence of E.W.J. Rambukwelle, inspector of schools in SLNA 108/28/1

[59] Memorandum and evidence of M.B. Panabokke in SLNA 108/28/2

[60] SLNA 108/28/4, Records of the proceedings at the public sittings of the Commission in the Yatikinda and Udukinda divisions of the Uva province, 5 to 13 January 1950, 148 typed pages. See especially the evidence of Suddhamapala S.B. Ratnayaka of Kitulwatte, Bogoda korale.

[61] Report of the Land Commission of 1987, Sessional Paper 3 of 1990.

 

Village versus plantation : colonial & post-colonial ideologies and practices , by Eric Meyer

We publish the revised text of a lecture delivered in November 2017 at the Sri Lanka seminar organized by the South Asia Institute of the University of Heidelberg. The readers will find further information on this seminar in www.sai.uni-heidelberg.de/en/

The social history of rural Sri Lanka is no longer popular among social science scholars while it was in the forefront in the first 30 years after independence : the ethnic conflict studies have swamped the academic field for the last three decades. I am pleading for a return to socio-economic research. I am convinced that such a return can help to better understand the long term trends of the island’s history, including the two major crisis manifested in the double JVP insurgencies and the enduring Tamil separatist movement.
The political implications of colonial and post-colonial land policies have been studied by several authors (notably Mick Moore, Vijaya Samaraweera, Asoka Bandarage) in the 1980s, when the take-over of estates by the SLFP government, just after the first JVP insurgency, gave the issue a great visibility. I reviewed the issue a bit later, with publications in the Journal of Peasant Studies and in Modern Asian Studies in 1992, and that same year, Mick Moore and Jonathan Spencer (in Agrarian Change in Sri Lanka edited by James Brow) added to the literature of the subject. Since that period, the subject has lost its appeal; a quarter of a century later, it may be worth revisiting the question in a critical way.
I am not going to analyse the impact of the plantation system on the village sector (which is the subject of various publications of mine), but rather :
– to trace the origins and development of the representations of ‘the plantation’ and ‘the village’ taken as reified opposite entities, personified by the opposite figures of ‘the peasant’ and ‘the cooly’, and to explain the meaning of the dualistic theories and practices in the colonial context ;
– to document the development and the mass appeal of what could be called the ‘peasantist’ ideology and the role played by it in the land policies promoted, first in the economic and political context of the 1920s-1930s by a section of the colonial administration, then by nationalist politicians before and after independence ;
– to assess the consequences of the different options followed by the colonial administration and by governments after independence, to remedy landlessness and rural unemployment : either large scale agrarian colonization in the dry zone (rougly speaking, the UNP policy, from Senanayake to Jayawardene, from Gal Oya to Mahaveli project) ; or to the redemption and redistribution of plantation land in the wet zone (the SLFP policy) ;
– to review the academic literature on the subject in the 1970s and 1980s – what was called at that time ‘peasant studies’ – , and to discuss the thesis developed by authors such as Moore that the ‘repeasantization’ policies checked the development of violent agrarian movements – taking into consideration the subsequent revolutionary and ethnic violence correlated with these policies, and what could be considered as ‘depeasantization’ resulting from 30 years of war.

Constructing the dualistic model and the ‘peasantist’ ideology

During the last quarter of the 19th century, the impact of the plantation system on peasant agriculture and more generally on the ecological systems of the island began to question a section of the colonial administration. But is is only during the late 1920s and 1930s that it became a central political issue coinciding with the setting up of the Donoughmore system of representation, and with the major depression which hit the plantation economy.
The proto-history of the question is connected with the first cyclical crisis of the plantation economy, characterized by the collapse of coffee in the early 1880s. Until then, the land policy of the colonial government, which appropriated and sold for a song to coffee planters large areas of primeval and secondary forests (generally used for chena – slash and burn – cultivation by villagers) in the Kandyan upper and mid-country, had met with little open opposition, except in 1859 (when a combination of Kandyan headmen sellers and prospective intermediaries and buyers, who actually represented planting interests, met in Kandy), and after the property of some Temple lands was rejected by government (but temples themselves started to lease their lands to planters). Actually a large proportion of villagers in combination with intermediaries started themselves to plant coffee in their gardens and came to depend on coffee sales to pay their paddy taxes. But with coffee collapse which hit both the estates and the village gardens in the early 1880s, many villagers lost their holdings – often mortgaged to intermediaries : they became landless and famine conditions developed (especially in Uva, Walapane, Matale). This is well documented in Asoka Bandarage book.
Before that crisis, only a few civil servants, such as the governor Sir Henry Ward (1855-1860), took an interest in what they described as the decline of the village community due to the growth of individualism. The 1880s represent a turning point : the coffee crisis coincided with the growing popularity in intellectual circles in Britain and the East of ideas held by authors such as Henry Maine and John Phear, who drew an ideal picture of ‘traditional’ peasant societies (1). In their conception, these societies were self-regulating and egalitarian, based on customary institutions such as gansabhava (village councils), and it was the duty of the colonial masters to uphold or restore the (imaginary) village in its pristine purity. These views were reinforced by two contemporary developments : 1. the growing awareness among specialists of botany and forestry of the ecological degradation resulting from deforestation and monoculture (the successive directors of the Peradeniya botanic gardens, Trimen and Thwaites, were quite influent). And 2. the archaeological works undertaken in the ancient cities of the dry zone, which revealed the advanced technology (especially hydraulics) attained by paddy cultivators in the past.
A group of young colonial administrators (Le Mesurier, Fisher, Price, Davidson, Burrows) attempted to alert the public opinion in the island and in Britain on the condition of the Ceylonese (and specifically Kandyan) peasantry ; they were discreetly and later openly supported by the governor Arthur Gordon (who gave them as guideline: « Keep the peasant on the land »). They obtained in England the support of the Aborigines Protection Society. This group proposed practical measures to ‘save the peasantry’ : their campaign led to the abolition of the grain taxes in the 1890s, and to various experiments aimed at creating new villages (such as Lamasuriyagama, named after Le Mesurier) or at minimizing the negative impact of plantations on village life. But at the same time, the colonial system remained heavily dependent on the development of the plantation economy, the political strength of the planting interests was dominant in Ceylon, and many colonial administrators were themselves involved in covert land dealings, including Le Mesurier himself.
These ‘pro-peasant’ administrators attempted to reconcile their practice with their ideas by adopting a dualistic theory which presented the village and the plantation as two totally independent economic and social entities, which were to be protected from each other and which were to be kept apart. They themselves had a romantic image of the village : an harmonious, egalitarian, beautiful, ecological and smoothly working village versus a destructive, exploitative and morally perverting plantation. The dualistic theory was compatible with the view of the mainstream colonial authorities and their successors the developmentalists, who considered the village as stagnant, non progressive, feudal, unenlightened and immobile, better left to its stagnation as long as it did not compromise the working of a vibrant entrepreneurial and capitalistic plantation sector. To take an example, the Revenue Officer of the Kägalla district in the early 1890s, Price, left what he called « Friendly notes » (2) to his successor Davidson, in which he instructed him to distinguish two parts in the district, one left to the planters, the other to the villagers : « Restrict further sale of land to Three Korales and keep Four Korales as the Garden of the East – with a prosperous peasantry untainted by the civilization [sic in text] of Scotland and Mincing Lane ». This instruction was an extension at the district level of a principle which was applied at the micro level to village lands in the same district : the Revenue Officers effected during the 1880s a summary division of highlands, setting apart areas of chenas for villagers and appropriating the rest for sale to planters or keeping them as reserved forests. But the experiment ended in failure, for lack of legal and governmental support in the face of a wave of land speculation.
These debates in the narrow milieu of the Ceylon Civil Service were not without impact on the views held by the Kandyans themselves : an example is that of a chief headman of the Matale district, Tikiri Banda Aluvihare Ratemahatmaya (Sir Richard Aluvihare’s father) : in 1896, he wrote a report (titled « the silent revolution in the village ») at the request of the AGA of Matale Burrows (himself in charge in 1884-1886 of what was to become later under H.C.P. Bell the Archaeology Department, and the author of a guide book on the Buried cities of Ceylon published in 1905 : this is not a simple coincidence). This document is as far as I know the first example of the Kandyan discourse which will become a cliché on the ideal village life disturbed by the advent of the British planter ; I have published this document in my paper published in Journal of Peasant Studies (1992).
The dualistic model became popular in other colonies as well, notably in Dutch territories ; it was theorized in the 1930s by the Dutch scholar Julius Boeke (translated in English only in 1953). And that the same model in another colonial context led to the apartheid system.
In the 1890s, the coffee crisis was over and after the successful conversion of large estates (but not smallholdings) from coffee to tea, would-be tea planters rushed to the Kandyan areas to obtain fresh land either from government, or from the villagers themselves, who were often ruined and could not take to tea, using intermediaries and various stratagems for their landgrabbing activities (see my paper in Modern Asian Studies, 1992). Soon followed a huge demand for land for rubber plantations in the mid-country of the wet zone, especially in the Kägalla and Ratnapura districts, and for coconut plantations, especially in the Kurunägala district, in which the Colombo-based emerging Ceylonese middle class played a prominent role. In these circumstances, the colonial government interfered and tried to curb land speculation and assert its control over land by a new waste lands ordinance in 1897, which paved the way for the birth of a Land Settlement Department.

Building the ‘peasantist’ ideology into the nationalist discourse

By the beginning of the XXth century, the idealized representation of village life became popular among the urban Sinhalese elite, while its lost its appeal to British civil servants. British colonial administrators in the previous years were proclaiming pro-peasant sentiments while practicing pro-planter policies, and the contradiction led some of them to drop out of the civil Service, like Le Mesurier. The views of the colonial administrators with a real knowledge of village life became generally pessimistic. A well known case is that of Leonard Woolf, who came back to England in disgust, to marry Virginia Stephens and write his celebrated novel on Ceylon, The Village in the Jungle, which was certainly not an hymn to the glory of the Sinhala Buddhist village, nor a picture of villagers oppressed by the planters, but on the contrary a representation of village society oppressed by an addition of natural, cultural and colonial forces. Others who remained in the remote areas of the island devoted their time to collect village folk tales (Henry Parker), or to defend the rights of the dry zone villagers (such as H.R. Freeman).
On the contrary, the ‘peasantist’ ideology was adopted as a central argument of the nascent nationalist discourse in its Sinhala-Buddhist version. Apparently this option went against the interests of a large section of the nationalist elite, which was very active in opening rubber and coconut plantations on former village chena lands. In the words of Samaraweera (1981) : « The first generation of national leaders were the most unlikely champions of the cause of the peasants (…) Some among them had actually benefitted from the British Land ordinances (…) It is difficult to resist the conclusion that the land qustion was looked upon by the first generation of nationalists as a convenient issue which would give legitimacy to their claim as representatives of the people of the colony ».
In this « typical urban middle class myth model of the harmonious village » (Spencer 1991), the ‘peasantist’ ideology (restoring the village) was grafted upon the Buddhist revival project (restoring the sasana) :
1. The ‘original’ village society was harmonious, without class conflicts, made up of peasants-aristocrats (in the words of Hocart, archaeologist and ethnologist, using himself the often-quoted Sinhala proverb related by Robert Knox « take a peasant, wash off his dirt, he is fit to be a king »)
2. Its economy was based on paddy cultivation (qualified as an ‘Aryan’ crop) and its inner organization was geared to the proper functioning of the hydraulic systems – revealed by the archaeology of the Rajarata and Ruhuna (the paddy field and the tank, yaya/wäwa) : the publications of Harischandra and his endeavour to make Anuradhapura a sacred city illustrate that view
3. The ‘original’ village society was free from crime, drunkenness, based on Buddhist values, transcending caste differences, and organized around the vihara : this is a central theme in Anagarika Dharmapala’s writings
4. The disintegration of the village was the result of outside malefic forces : the Tamil invasions in the past, the British invasion of the present, with the complicity of the ‘foreign traders and moneylenders’
5. The (British) plantation and its (Tamil) coolies was the negative antithesis of the (Aryan) village and its (Sinhala) peasants
6. Restoring the ‘original’ village was the most urgent national duty, to avoid the degradation of the free peasant into a slave cooly, equated with the degeneration of the Sinhala ‘race’.
These ideas were borrowed from European authors of the late 19th century and early 20th century quoted above. But the myth was promoted among the urban anglicized elite by outstanding writers such as the Anagarika Dharmapala or the young Solomon Bandaranaike (3) ; Indian models such as Gandhi and Rabindranath Tagore were popular among the enthusiastic bourgeois youth who ‘discovered’ a romanticized version of the peasant life, while their fathers were at the same time exploiting the peasantry. The success of the myth had a political utility as well, which was to unite Kandyans and Low Country Sinhalese against a common enemy, real or imagined, the outsider (a composite category comprising the British planter, the Tamil cooly, the Chettiar moneylender, the Indian Muslim trader), and to offset the grievances of the Kandyans against the landgrabbing activities of the Low Country Sinhalese.
A committeee on landless and indebted villagers was set up in 1925 by the Legislative Council. Among its members were two outstanding figures, D.S. Senanayake and Madawela. Madawela was the representative of the Kurunegala district, where he had been active since 1906 in organizing the opposition to the activities of the Land Settlement Department in that area, where he was himself active in land dealings, together with various low country speculators from the Negombo-Chilaw area, such as the Corea brothers. Don Stephen Senanayake and his brothers were the sons of a successful landed proprietor who had made a fortune in graphite mining and had extended his coconut and rubber estates in the mid-country, but his reputation was built as fierce opponent to the repressive policy of the British during the First world war. At the beginning D.S. Senanayake’s position was quite close to that of Madawela: « In Ceylon there is no land at present suitable for the further cultivation of rubber, as the government is adopting the dog-in-the-manger policy. Ceylon would be far more prosperous if the government opens its eyes to the fact and releases land as much as possible » (Testimony before the committee of the Legislative Council on rubber restriction, CO54/874). They both were in touch with the most influent Ceylonese planters of the time, belonging to the new rich class, who in the 1920s were busy purchasing lands for rubber and coconut cultivation, such C.E.A. Dias and Dr Marcus Fernando, and with the Low Country Products Association which represented their interests. At the same time they were connected with Kandyan family groups who had themselves been involved in large scale land trasactions in the mid-country areas, such as the Meedeniyas, and with the influential press baron D.R. Wijewardene. Cases of villages entirely surrounded by plantations, and of villagers forcibly displaced, were frequent in the Deraniyagala area, and in all these cases Meedeniya, various intermediaries such as Van der Poorten and capitalists such as Wijewardene were implicated.
The Land Settlement Department, established by the Land ordinance of 1897, was very active after 1918 in two districts, Kurunegala and Ratnapura, where Ceylonese elite speculators were most involved, and it was their ‘bête noire’. Its officers were the resolute adversaries of the landgrabbers and saw themselves as the defenders of the peasantry, especially in the Kurunägala district, where small and medium landbuyers, anxious to invest in coconut estates, were purchasing title from villagers cheaply in advance of settlement by borrowing money on mortgage of these dubious titles from Indian moneylenders (Nattukottai Chettiar and ‘Coast Moors’). Before the Committee on landless/indebted villagers, Senanayake and Madawela tried to ruin the image of the Settlement officers as defenders of the peasantry, by insisting on the responsability of the Land Settlement operations in compelling the villagers to part with their lands, and pointed the role of Indians in the indebtedness and subsequent land sales of villagers in the coconut triangle, while in fact the Nattokottai Chettiars were lending money to would-be medium scale investors, most of them non-resident, rather than to small peasants. Madawela insisted that the Department should more liberally recognize private property of highlands, while the Settlement officers attempted to check the alienation of land to non-villagers.

‘Repeasantization’ : proactive land policies in the age of economic depression

In 1927, the then governor Hugh Clifford decided to appoint a Land Commission to review the entire land policy of Ceylon (4). This was a time when the great depression had not yet affected the plantation economy, which was booming. The starting points were the motion moved by Madawela and passed by the Legislative Council that the Settlement Officers should be instructed to recognize the private property of chenas, and the pressing request by a group of Ceylonese planters allied with British planters, and especially of Marcus Fernando, to speed up land sales in the wet zone for rubber, especially in Ratnapura and Kalutara, and in the Uva patanas for tea. The argument of Fernando (himself a former medical doctor, connected with the De Soysa big business family) was that many professional men had saved money and were anxious to invest in land, that owing to the slowness of the Land settlement proceedings, money was lying idle, that « the villagers have advanced side by side with the planters », and that the prosperity of the villages was proportionate with their proximity to a plantation.
These projects were opposed by popular meetings organized by local popular assiciations (Mahajana Sabhas) and became a public issue, and the colonial administration, startled by the risk of popular agitation, felt compelled to arbitrate between opposite demands. In a minute dated november 1926, the Acting Colonial Secretary wrote that there were two forces trying to influence the government policy : « the commercial establishment pressing it to expedite land sales to take advantage of the present boom ; the other may be described as the Ceylon nationalist party ; its extremists object to any Crown sale policy for estates and demand that land be reserved for the indigenous population »
Clifford’s own position was expressed in a text dated 11.02.1927 : « A school of thought has developed since 1910 [when Clifford was Colonial Secretary] until 1925-7 [Clifford being Governor] which maintains that tea and rubber estates are a parasitic growth which is battening upon the colony’s lifeblood, that they have worked no appreciable benefit to the indigenous inhabitants of the country and that they owe their existence to a systematic series of acts of expripriation and spoliation » ; Clifford considered it as « an historical and economic error » which « helps to fan the fires of class and racial prejudices, the blazing up of which can work nothing but misery and confusion ». But on the other side his position was that « the primary object of government is the multiplication of smallholdings, provided steps can be taken to prevent improvident alienation. The rapid development by means of estates of land which has not yet been exploited is by comparison a secondary consideration (…) I consider that early steps should be taken to encourage the overflow of (landless) people to such areas of fertile crown lands as are still available (in the wet zone), I should greatly prefer to see suitable crown lands utilized for this purpose than sold for conversion to still more estates. »
The Commission, which comprised officials of the colonial administration and elected members of the Legislative Concil, received a mass of memoranda and sat for one full year ; a part of its records were published in several reports in 1928 and 1929 but most remain in manuscript form. Its findings were informed by the ‘peasantist’ ideology : to quote the reports : « There is a very strong feeling among the unofficial members of the commission that villagers should not become coolies on estates ». « The rapid exploitation of the villager and his expulsion from his ancestral lands, the government being powerless to check the almost universal demoralization resulting from the success of the shameless practice of landgrabbing ». Many colonial administrators pleaded for greater powers to reserve lands in favour of the peasantry, and check landgrabbing, but they were sceptical about the possibility to operate a complete revolution : « I am not aware that anyone seriously contemplates the gigantic task of setting right the mistakes of the past by the only possible method, viz acquisition of lands from estates and their free sale to villagers » (Hodson, Government Agent North Western Province).
Unofficial members of the Commission, notably Madawela and Senanayake (in the 5th and 6th interim reports) while claiming to speak on behalf of the ‘poor peasant’, opposed any measures which would restrict the rights of the villagers to dispose of their lands. Besides these claims in favour of the peasantry, what is significant is that the Commission insisted that ‘middle class Ceylonese’ (as opposed in its phraseology to ‘outside capitalists’) should also get reserved lands, with the idea that their presence in the midst of the peasantry could introduce an element of authority and moral order. Senanayake suggested that blocks of 50 acres of highland suitable for coconut should be sold to these ‘middle class Ceylonese’, excluding outsiders, that is Tamil kanganies and Muslim traders : « the middle and professional classes (…) too wealthy to be classed as villagers (…) too poor to compete with big capitalists and companies (…) for the benefit of peasants men of educated classes should hold and cultivate estates of medium size (…) not only by providing employment for the peasants but also by securing the residence among peasants of men of culture and position ». C.L.Wickremesinghe, a friend of Senanayake and future Land Commissionner, who married his son Esmond to the daughter of D.R. Wijewardene, the press magnate, declared before the Commission : « Many of the middle class eke out a hand to mouth existence [sic]. I agree that Crown Land should be alienated to them… ».
The mechanisms set up to put into practice a new land policy were inspired by an influent but controversial colonial administrator, Charles Valentine Brayne. His elder brother Frank Lugard Brayne, a member of the Indian Civil Service, was one of the promoters of the Punjab colonies (5) ; Charles Valentine as government agent in Batticaloa had experimented a system of restricted tenure and planned alienation of land which he called ‘mapping out’, and obtained the green light of the government for that ; together with some of his colleagues he proposed to extend the system to the planting districts, and applied for the post of Land Commissionner when its creation was decided. His views were developed in an interesting unpublished text titled The protection of the village (6) « Everyone will admit that in parts of the country under rapid development in rubber and other economic products, there is a danger of the village disappearing and the villagers becoming landless. This has been put down by some to the government selling land to capitalists without sufficient forethought for village requirements. This may have occurred in certain cases. There is however a more potent factor at work, and one which presents a more complicated problem : government has now ceased to alienate land to capitalists, except after the most careful precautions to safeguard the future needs of the villagers ; the problem of the landgrabber has not however been solved ».
Brayne was criticized, violently opposed and even ridiculed by some of his colleagues who called him « Brainless Brayne », but his proposals were eventually adopted by the Land Commission and he was put in charge as Land Commissionner. D.S. Senanayake himself sided with him when he became the first Minister of Agriculture in the new State Council established in 1931. The Land Development ordinance of 1935 gave a legal basis to the system : but in the meantime, the great slump had intervened, which ruined land investors, threw out of employment hundreds of thousand coolies, and deeply affected the villagers who depended on estates : the dramatic malarial epidemic in Kurunägala and Kägalla in 1934-35 was partly the result of unemployment leading to undernutrition.
The great depression proved the falseness of the dualistic theories, the vulnerability of the peasant economy linked with the vulnerability of the plantation economy, especially owing to the overproduction of rubber which was the result of extensive planting. Its major political result was to give an impetus to the radical leftist movement, and to make it adopt the ‘peasantist’ approach. Young intellectuals underlined the contrast between abandoned estates and overcrowded villages. Following marxist orthodoxy, some of them undertook to organize (Tamil) coolies, considering them as an industrial proletariat ; but others began to demand the repurchase of estate lands for redistribution to (Sinhalese) villagers. One of the first promoters of the leftist movements, Wilmot Perera, defended a project of ‘Village reconstruction’ in his book Problems of Rural Ceylon (1932). He was the son of a ‘rubber king’ of Panadura, and convened an All Ceylon Rural Reconstruction Conference at his Horana estate in May 1932, where S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike spoke ; shortly afterwards, he founded the Suriya Mal Society in 1933, the precursor of the Lanka Samasamaja Party of which he was a member. He initiated a series of socio-economic studies of villages in 1934. He later became parlementarian and ended his career as Bandaranaike’s ambassador to Mao’s China in 1957.
Meanwhile, the landed middle class demanded the annulation of its debts, the expulsion of Indian moneylenders, and of all immigrants, with racist arguments reminiscent of antisemitism in Europe. Bandaranaike wrote in 1933 : « Rich and poor are being sold up by their creditors and driven in the streets, homeless beggars ». The memoranda and evidence of the Ceylon Banking Commission of 1934 are filled with these claims and complaints. Xenophobic – Indophobic sentiments were fuelled by the policy of the Indian authorities who appeared to interfere in Ceylon affairs, and eventually led to the disenfranchisement of Indian workers and merchants established in the island. The emerging Ceylonese elite (actually Low country Sinhalese) was careful to preserve its interests, through the creation of a Mortgage Bank (headed by Marcus Fernando) and later of a Central Bank. At the same time, the Land Commissionner services (controlled by Senanayake as Minister of Agriculture), undertook the distribution of available Crown land in populous areas of the wet zone, by mapping out and distribution of allotments, but resources were limited as long as the estates were left untouched. In the dry zone land was available, but malaria was still endemic and most attempts at restoration of the ideal hydraulic villages ended in failure.
The second world war, where Ceylon held a strategic position, created a new state of affairs : the rubber economy bounced back, food drive led the authorities to be very liberal in recognizing land rights, the government started to repurchase plantation land alienated to outsiders for distribution to villagers, especially in Kägalla district, where difficulties arose in 1946 in Knavesmire Estate, between expelled coolies and village allottees. Henceforth, the lax policy of succesive governments allowed quiet but uninterrupted encroachments by villagers on lands proclaimed as Crown by the Land Settlement Department. Finally, the extensive use of DDT against malarial mosquitoes made it possible to start land colonization in the dry zone, especially in the Eastern province, under the leadership of Senanayake, who became the First Prime Minister of independent Ceylon, in 1948. His policy of organized peasant colonization was again based on the ‘peasantist’ approach. It had a double objective : developping the country’s self sufficiency in paddy ; and deflecting rural discontent, land distribution to Kandyans in the new settlements acting as a sort of safety valve, without encroaching upon the planting interests. This policy allowed Low Country Sinhalese politicians to get the support of the Kandyans. But it alienated the Tamils because it encroached on the areas they considered as their homeland.

‘Peasantism’ in post-colonial political and academic controversies

At independence, the problem of landlessness was by no means new, but it had acquired such a visibility that it remained in the forefront, and became the major topic of research for social scientists and specialists of economic development, and a central political issue. The 1950s and 1960s witnessed a flurry of field researches on Ceylon villages, including very valuable ethnographical and sociological studies. After the Report of the Kandyan Peasantry Commission (1951), appeared a Report of Peradeniya University social scientists Sarkar and Tambiah (1957) under the title The Disintegrating Village, of the book of B.H. Farmer on Peasant colonization (1957), of Pul Eliya of Edmund Leach (1961) ; in the field of art and literature, the publication in Sinhala in 1944 of Gamperaliya (‘Village Upheaval’) by Martin Wickremasinghe was a landmark. These works exerted an influence on and were themselves influenced by the political controversies of the time.
The Kandyan Peasantry Commission analysed the adverse impact of the plantation system in a systematic way. Pre-colonial peasant economy was presented as an ecological system in equilibrium, achieving self sufficiency in food and employment, through the paddy system of production. Village society was depicted as knit together by common language, religion, and cultural traditions, « a great majority of the peasant population professing the Buddhist religion ». The advent of the plantation economy resulted in dualism, non-integration of the two sectors, and loss ; the villages became hemmed-in by estates : this obsessive image is constantly repeated. The major themes were the theft by the estate sector of useful peasant land and subsequent landlessness ; ecological impact of deforestation on paddy cultivation ; preferential treatment of Tamil coolies by authorities ; moral disintegration of peasant society : « New land was unavailable for village expansion, village councils gansabhava fell into disuse, prospect of crown claiming land prompted numerous sales to speculators, the old unity of village life began to disappear, moral and social standards were adversely affected, child marriage and giving out children for domestic service became common »
There was nothing new in these arguments, and many scholars consider the Report of the Kandyan Peasantry Commission as a rehearsal of commonplaces – what could be expected from a commission made up of a Colombo lawyer, two upper caste Kandyan MPs (Attygalle and Panabokke), and a representative of the Kandyan low castes, all of them close to Senanayake. In my opinion however, the Report is highly significant : its findings were based on a great number of memoranda (about 650), many of them in Sinhala, by various individuals and local associations, and by enquiries on the spot in different parts of the Kandyan regions in March and April 1949, one year after Independence, during which about 150 individuals were heard during public sittings. Most of these papers remained unprinted but are still available in the Archives : for example, the sittings of the commission in Badulla are vividly reported in a sort of diary. These documents reveal a high degree of public awareness of land problems in the Kandyan regions. A detailed examination of the lists of participants shows that the sociology of the memorialists closely corresponds with that of the people who will ensure seven years later the electoral success of the SLFP : schoolteachers, monks, high caste Bandaras and Appuhamys, a few low caste leaders, Village Committees, Cooperative Credit Societies and about 200 Rural Development Societies (the sittings were organized by Ellepola, in charge of these societies in the Ministry) ; besides these Kandyans, a fair number of Low Country Sinhalese established up-country as traders or small scale planters and writing in English ; and very few Muslims and Tamils. The result is that although the Commission was made up of UNP supporters, their report offers a sort of blueprint of what was to become the SLFP master narrative. These arguments are found after 1956 in the speeches of Bandaranaike and his Agriculture Minister (for a short time) the Marxist leader Philip Gunawardena, which are directly derived from the ‘peasantist’ theory, in which the Sinhala people is defined as a people of peasants.
Sarkar and Tambiah’s published six years after the Report of the Kandyan Peasantry Commission, just after the victory of Bandaranaike at the 1956 elections, an academic work, based on a detailed socio-economic quantitative study of a group of villages in the lower Dumbara valley (7). It was introduced by a sort of abstract of the Report, which gave it a scientific legitimacy. The very title of the book was derived from it. But it was however less prone to draw an idealistic picture of village life. Among the similarities, the insistence on history (« the basis of rural economy in ancient Ceylon was paddy cultivation »), the emphasis put on the « well integrated and self-sufficient social and economic system, well adapted to certain ecological factors », the affirmation that « the invasion of this system by the plantations struck a damaging blow to its stability, destroyed the balance between paddy, chena and forest », the use of the term « degeneration of the community »; the emphasis on ecological impact of the destruction of forests ; an analysis of the vicious circle of modernisation, better health services, population increase, landlessness, exploitation by the bourgeoisie of the less fortunate, and impact of the new law system. The study differed from the Report in that it used a statistical and scientific approach, and in that economic exploitation inside the Kandyan society was put on the same footing as « victimization and exploitation by the middle classes, merchants and estate owners » ; although not informed by the marxist theory, the book, because of its scientific approach, was to exert a decisive influence on the leftist Ceylonese intellectuals.
That same year 1957, B.H. Farmer published a detailed study of the dry zone colonies (8), which can be considered as a semi-critical assessment of the first results of the Senanayake policy started with the Land Commission of 1928 and the Land Development Ordinance of 1935, but really applied to the dry zone only after the war and the use of DDT. He pointed out the romanticism which led to exaggerate the wealth and population of ancient Rajarata and Ruhuna based on irrigation works : « it is important to give the lie to estimates which are grossly exaggerated ; if such receive credence as they unfortunately do they engender false optimism about the carrying capacity of the dry zone… ». He therefore doubted the capacity of the colonies to solve Kandyan landlessness problems, which he recognized as serious, while suggesting a balanced analysis of its causes : « The author is convinced by field evidence that the Crown Lands Encroachment Ordinance and the estates which grew because of it, have borne hard on many Kandyan villages and in doing so have accentuated an agrarian problem which would have been serious in any case ». Farmer became the first director of the Center of South Asian Studies at Cambridge, established in 1964, and his book sowed the seeds of a critique of the nationalist discourse on the question of the responsibility of the British pro-planter policy in the Kandyan agrarian problems.
This ‘revisionist’/developmentalist approach was initially defended by Lal Jayawardena : in his Cambridge thesis (1963) he raised the question as to why the Kandyan peasants, if evicted on a mass scale, did not become wage workers on the plantations ; he therefore minimized the impact, maintained that the colonial administration undertook to efficiently protect the peasantry, and at the same time exposed the responsibility of landgrabbers, especially members of the rising nationalist elite (his wife Kumari who wrote at the same time her thesis on the nationalist/working class movements in the interwar period once said to me : « my heroes are his bad guys ») ; but Lal Jayawardena left his work unpublished (he became a career economist and diplomat) and therefore had no influence, except on the group of historians at the Peradeniya University who from the mid-1960s until the mid-1970s undertook to deconstruct the Kandyan discourse, at a time when the campus was the scene of a growing agitation led by marxist students, especially during the year 1971. The Ceylon Studies Seminar met in the late 1960s under the aegis of Kingsley De Silva, with Michael Roberts, Vijaya Samaraweera, and L.A. Wickremaratne : they elaborated the ‘revisionist’ thesis in various papers which found their way in the Peradeniya History of Ceylon volume III. After the JVP insurgency and university reforms, some left Sri Lanka like so many British-educated intellectuals, while others regrouped outside the universities in NGOs and various foreign funded research institutes. But at the same time, western economists such as Snodgrass could still defend the dualistic theory : in 1966, Snodgrass spoke of « the classic purity of the Ceylonese case », of a « dualism nearly perfect » and maintaned that « smallholder production of export crops had only a marginal impact upon the giant mass [sic] of the traditional economy »

‘Peasant Studies’ ‘Repeasantization’, ‘Depeasantization’ : 1971 and after.

The shock of the unexpected 1971 insurgency left indelebile traces in the realm of politics and economy. Its immediate results were the new republican constitution of 1972, and the take-over of the large plantations between 1972 and 75. The event had also a far reaching impact in the research field with the creation of the Agrarian Research and Training Institute established in Colombo in 1972. The insurgency was immediately interpreted (by the ruling classes and by their foreign advisers who began to swamp Sri Lanka with their foundations, NGO’s and the like) as the result of unemployment and subsequent demoralization among the educated rural youth, and also, (I insist on this point which is often overlooked because the JVP itself adopted elements of the nationalist discourse), to the influence of outside, non-national forces. These interpretations reinforced the political attempts to ‘repeasantize’ (term used by Moore) society, to reinject moral values, to promote ‘national thinking’ – Jathika Chintanaya.
It is often assumed – for example by Moore (9) – that the JVP had no agrarian programme, and therefore no real appeal among the rural masses. This is also the impression left by the books of Alles and of Gunaratna, who are up to prove that the only aim of the JVP was the seizure of power by a leninist-guevarist strategy : both books are written in a judiciary and political science perspective, and insist that JVP « was essentially a cadre party which had a limited public support » (10). It is true that the JVP was not an agrarian mass organization as such ; but its appeal for a great number of rural youth was based on what we have called ‘peasantism’. JVPers shared the ‘peasantist’ views of the SLFPers and integrated them in their revolutionary agenda. The ‘Five Lectures’ conceived by Rohan Wijeweera by the end of 1967 and diffused through classes of endoctrination in the high schools and universities give the rough elements of the JVP. ideology. They have not been published as far as I know, but their substance can be found in the statement of Wijeweera to the police (C.I.D.) dated 1971 and in the JVP press in Sinhala (11).
The first lesson dealt with ‘The economic crisis’ (the following were: 2 ‘Independence’ 3. ‘Indian expansionism’ 4 ‘Leftist movement’ 5 ‘The path to revolution’). The lectures were designed to fit with the aspirations of the educated unemployed rural youth. According to a classical marxist-leninist approach, the economic crisis faced by Sri Lanka was attributed to the impact of colonialism and post-colonial capitalism, in the form of the impact of the plantation economy on the peasant sector : « the primary root of the problem is the collapse of a self-sufficient economy ; the birth of the tea plant at the expense of kurakkan is the main cause of the crisis ». Then follows the usual analysis of rural decline found in the nationalist discourse, which is integrated into the revolutionary logic :
1. That the nationalist-bourgeois (and the walauwa people) were actually lying when they pretended to take the side of the peasantry. It was only by armed struggle that a real independence could be obtained, the maoist way; the old left similarly failed because it was prisoner of the democratic game, western ideas and modes, and led a bourgeois corrupt life, cut from the authentic masses. 2. That the real revolutionary class was made up of landless peasants, and swabhasha-educated unemployed youth (including young monks)(12) 3. That Indian plantation workers, contrary to the classical leftist view, were not a proletariat but the agents of imperialism, part and parcel of the plantation system
What was to be done ? According to Wijeweera in his submissions to the CID : « We should change the entire economy. The basic aim is to do away with the plantation industry, the hill slopes should be reafforested, reservoirs built, rivers diverted to the dry zone ». It was commonly said by JVPers in the villages in 1971 that they would uproot rubber and tea and plant yams instead – this is what had been done since 1935 in the Village Expansion Schemes that became the hotbed of JVP activities notably in the Kägalla district. Finally, the JVP strategy was to be guevarist rather than maoist : the conquest of towns from countryside being difficult in Sri Lanka, the leadership envisioned an instant revolution rather than a long walk ; as we know, this strategy ended in failure.
A parallel, or possibly a connection between JVP and Khmer Rouge ideologies may be explored. In a paper read at an international workshop on cultural heritages held at Heidelberg in 2011 (« The myth of Angkor as an essential component of the Khmer Rouge utopia »), Locard shows that there was an ‘repeasantization’ component in the economic policy of the Khmer Rouge. Their utopia – back to the countryside and to self-sufficient food producing peasantry- was grounded on the myth of Angkor ‘the hydraulic city’, just as the JVP utopia was grounded on the image of Anuradhapura. Both kingdoms had grown rich and powerful because they controlled extensive irrigation systems that produced surpluses of rice. By building a nationwide system of irrigation canals, dams, and reservoirs, the Khmer Rouge leadership believed it would be possible to produce rice on a year-round basis (13).
Successive attempts by SLFP and UNP to solve the problem of Kandyan landlessness and unemployment within the framework of the peasantist/nationalist ideology constitute in my opinion a decisive factor contibuting to the violence of the ethnic crisis, and finally fuelling the war itself. The SLFP in 1972 made the choice of the land reforms which were supposed to radically transform the system from above. It entailed a real dispossession for the class of the low country political leaders (coconut estates) but not for the upper caste Kandyans (paddy and temple lands which they controlled were excluded). In part, it was an extension of the principle of Village Expansion Schemes, but only 10% of the land was actually redistributed ; for the rest, it was an attempt at collectivization, creating cooperative production, which resulted in poor management, actual expulsion or even killing of Tamil coolies or supervisors, and the final restitution of plantation management by the state to private firms. The multiplication of violent clashes between Sinhalese (generally people from bazaars rather than villagers) and Tamils on estates, starting in 1977 and renewed in 1983, signalled the failure of the take-over project.
Back into power in 1977 with J.R. Jayawardene, (from a Low Country wealthy planting family connected with the Senanayakes), Gamini Dissanayake (from a Kandyan wealthy Goyigama family of Kotmale) and the low caste rival leaders Cyril Matthew and Ranasinghe Premadasa, the UNP immediately undertook to expedite the ‘repeasantization’ of the country with the Accelerated Mahaveli Development Project, which was meant to relocate impovershed Kandyans (especially from Uva and Matale) close to their native land and in continuity with the Gal Oya project. Jayawadene himself found it necessary to reinvent agrarian rituals in the very district where his class had grabbed land. Even Premadasa, who as a typical working class urbanite could have despised the peasantist ideology, felt it necessary to launch the Gam Udawa project (specifically for low caste villages). But the ‘repeasantization’ project was slowed down by the war, and aggravated interethnic relations, especially in the Eastern province. At the same time, the successive governments, either SLFP or UNP, were very lax in checking encroachment by villagers on public land for the purpose of putting up houses and gardens, either in the wet or in the dry zone. Local civil servants were easily corrupted, and local strong men, with the right political connections, were always ready to help. It was estimated in the 1980s that one sixth of the house cum garden plots in the whole country were thus acquired.
While these developments were taking place in the countryside in the 1970s and 1980s, ‘peasant studies’ became extremely popular in academic circles, but these critical researches had little bearing on actual policies. In the 1960s appeared the great stream of peasant studies – linked with the maoist experience in China. Eric Wolf published Peasants in 1966, Peasant Wars some time later, the Journal of Peasant Studies was started in 1973 by Terence Byres of London University, Eric Stokes published ‘The return of the peasant to South Asian history’ in South Asia, 1976. In France, the publications of the agronomist globe-trotter René Dumont (who was later a founding member of the Green party) were best sellers, and he was invited to visit Sri Lanka by Chandrika Bandaranaike : his book Paysanneries aux abois (Peasantries at bay) published in 1972 devotes 100 pages to Sri Lanka.
Agrarian Research and Training Institute’s field studies were published in a series of monographs in the late 1970s, and some of these studies were collected in Morrison (1979) published under the same title as Sarkar and Tambiah. Shortly afterwards, four theses of political economy using a more or less marxist approach were defended and later published : Tilak Hettiarachchy (The Sinhala Peasant MA 1978), Asoka Bandarage (Colonialism in Sri Lanka Ph D Yale 1980) and Mick Moore (The State and Peasant Politics in Sri Lanka Ph D Sussex 1981). Several papers by the marxist political scientist Newton Gunasinghe (Ph D Sussex 1979, who died prematurately in 1988) were later published by the Social Scientists Association. Further additions to this body of literature were the contributions to a conference held in Anuradhapura in July 1984 published in 1992 by Brow and Weeramunda, Agrarian change in Sri Lanka. Other important publications included Charles Abeysekera, Capital and peasant production, Social Scientists Association, 1985 (especially the introduction by Newton Gunasinghe) ; and the report of the Third Land Commission headed by Prof. Madduma Bandara, in 1987.
Tilak Hettiarachchi’s historical booklet published in 1982 reproduced the nationalist discourse (as suggested by its title, The Sinhala peasant) with a marxist packaging, making a mechanical use of Dobb, Polanyi and Eric Wolf. The cover of the book showed the trinity ‘Wäwa, Caitya, Yaya’ with a crack. The author maintained that the pre-plantation peasant system based on paddy cultivation was balanced, self supporting, sustainable, socially indifferentiated and economically homogeneous and free from any clash of interests. He ignored the debates raised by the revisionist school. The facts were taken mainly from published writings on the coffee era.
Asoka Bandarage’s book on colonialism published in 1983 was more sophisticated. Colonialism in Sri Lanka, the Political Economy of the Kandyan Highlands adopted the general thesis of the disintegrating impact but took into account the revisionist theories ; Asoka Bandarage attempted to deconstruct peasant myths and to analyse class conflicts inside the village society (« the overdrawn image of the Sinhalese as a nation of rice cultivators and rice eaters, constituted an important element in the ideological control exercised by the overlords in keeping peasants tied to the paddy fields »). But at the same time she agreed with the idea that peasantry was homogeneous in Kandyan times, economically speaking, and that « caste differences within an otherwise homogeneous peasantry inhibited the emergence of a class consciousness and collective action among the cultivator class ».
Newton Gunasinghe’s papers and other publications by the group of social anthropologists and political scientists known as Social Scientists Association were much more critical, written in a neo-marxist perspective. Newton Gunasinghe attributed to the repeasantization strategy the technological stagnation, and considered that Village Expansion schemes were more housing projects than agricultural projects.
The theoretical question raised by Mick Moore (who was attached to the Agrarian Research and Training Institute and the Sussex School of Development Studies) was the absence of a peasant (smallholder) political interest group and of peasant movements in Sri Lanka, in which he saw the result of the ‘repeasantization’ strategy of the ruling classes. He considered that this strategy was a success : « Unlike almost all other developing countries Sri Lanka has experienced no major flight of people from the rural areas to the cities » He explained that the major reason for that was « the relative excellence of public provision for most of the population » : a cheap transport network, free education, free health, subsidized prices of foodstuff, land given out to the poor, extension of small scale family farming, social laws, low incidence of taxation. As a result, « the total number of agricultural holdings has increased faster than the rural population ; the center of gravity of the smallholder economy has shifted substantially to the dry zone ; rice production through this process has expanded faster than plantation production ». Even in the plantation sector, the development occurred in Sinhalese-owned smallholdings, especially in the South, and employment on estates was increasingly occupied by non-resident Sinhalese villagers. If we follow Mick Moore, the Senanayake and Bandaranaike policies have succeeded. Then 1971 appears as a minor revolt and not as a peasant class revolt in any case, and the ethnic crisis is something unconnected with general socio-economic problems. On the contrary, C.M. Madduma Bandara (President of Third Land Commission) in a report of 1987 maintained that Village expansion schemes had not ‘created’ a prosperous peasantry as anticipated by the planners of the 1930s : « On the contrary the majority of these settlements have become pockets of poverty and areas of social deprivation. Many of them have become centres of turmoil in the present crisis (JVP) ».

After 30 years of civil war, of militarization or massive outmigration of the youth, and of growing ‘rurbanization’, are the questions raised in the 1970s and 1980s still relevant ? I would suggest that the war signalled the failure of the ‘repeasantization’ projects : a large proportion of the unemployed rural young men found employment as soldiers in the war, while a large proportion of rural women went out as factory workers or as maids in the Middle East.
What happened was ‘de-peasantization’ rather than ‘re-peasantization’ : what remains are nostalgic symbols such as Rajapaksa’s kurakkan-colour shawl… Power in the countryside has been seized not by agrarian leaders, but by successful mudalalis (petty businessmen) and armed gangs. Village Buddhist values have been superseded by the discourse of urban activist monks. It looks as if what a century or more of colonization had spared has been disintegrated by three decades of turmoil.

Bibliography :
ABEYSEKERA Charles ed., Capital and Peasant Production. Studies in the continuity and discontinuity of Agrarian Structures in Sri Lanka. Colombo : Social Scientists Association, 1985
BANDARAGE Asoka, Colonialism in Sri Lanka, the Political Economy of the Kandyan Highlands. Berlin/New York : Mouton, 1983
BROW James & WEERAMUNDA Joe, eds., Agrarian Change in Sri Lanka. New Delhi : Sage, 1992
The Disintegrating Village. Report of a Socio-economic Survey conducted by the University of Ceylon [Sarkar & Tambiah]. Colombo : Ceylon University Press, 1957
DUMONT René, Paysanneries aux abois : Ceylan, Tunisie, Sénégal. Paris : Le Seuil, 1972
FARMER B.H., Pioneer Peasant Colonization in Ceylon. London : Oxford University Press, 1957
GUNASINGHE Newton, Changing Socio-Economic Relations in the Kandyan Countryside. Colombo : Social Scientists Association, 1990.
HETTIARACHCHY Tilak, The Sinhala Peasant in a Changing Society. Colombo : Lake House, 1982
LOCARD Henri, « The myth of Angkor as an essential component of the Khmer Rouge utopia » in Falzer Michael ed., Cultural Heritage and Civilizing Mission, Heidelberg, Springer, 2015, p. 201-222
MEYER Eric « ‘Enclave’ Plantations, ‘Hemmed-in’ Villages and Dualistic Representations in Colonial Ceylon » in Val. Daniel et al. Plantations, Peasants and Proletarians in Colonial Asia, London : Cass 1992 ; also published in Journal of Peasant Studies 19 (3/4)
MEYER Eric « « From Landgrabbing to Landhunger: High Land Appropriation in the Plantation Areas of Sri Lanka during the British Period. » Modern Asian Studies 26, 2, (1992) pp. 321-361.
MOORE Mick, The State and Peasant Politics in Sri Lanka. Cambridge, U.P., 1985
MOORE Mick, « The Ideological History of the Sri Lankan ‘Peasantry’ » in Brow & Weeramunda p. 325-356
MORRISON Barry et al . eds., The Disintegrating Village. Social Change in Rural Sri Lanka. Colombo : Lake House, 1979.
SAMARANAYAKE Gamini, Political Violence in Sri Lanka, 1971-1987. New Delhi : Gyan, 2008
SAMARAWEERA Vijaya, « Land, Labour, Capital and Sectional Interests in the National Politics of Sri Lanka » Modern Asian Studies 15 (1), 1981, 127 – 162
SNODGRASS Donald, Ceylon, an Export Economy in Transition. Homewood : Irwin, 1966.
SPENCER Jonathan « Representations of the rural, a view from Sabaragamuwa » in Brow & Weeramunda 1992, p. 357-387

Sources :
Report of the Kandyan Peasantry Commission, Ceylon Sessional Paper 18/1951
Land Commission Reports, Ceylon Sessional Papers, 1927-1929
Cambridge South Asian Archive : C.V. Brayne Papers
Sri Lanka National Archives (Colombo and Kandy), Record Groups 30 (Kägalla district), 69 (Land Commissionner), 108.28 (Kandyan Peasantry Commission), 220 (Land Settlement)
Colonial Office Archives (Public Record Office, Kew), series CO54.

Notes
(1) Henry Maine, Village Communities in east and west, 1871 ; John Budd Phear (former Chief Justice of Ceylon 1877-79), The Aryan village, 1880.
(2) Sri Lanka National Archives 30/2246
(3) S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike, The spinning wheel and the paddy field, 1933.
(4) Sri Lanka National Archives : Commentaries, Memoranda, and Evidence before the Land Commission, 1927-1928 ; Confidential files 1926 ; Hugh Clifford, Some Reflections on the Ceylon Land Question, Colombo, 1927.
(5) His books published during those years : Village uplift in India (1927) and The remaking of village India (1929) made him famous in India
(6) C.V. Brayne papers, South Asia Archive, Cambridge (undated, probably 1928)
(7) The Disintegrating Village. Report of a Socio-economic Survey conducted by the University of Ceylon [Sarkar & Tambiah]. Colombo : Ceylon University Press, 1957
(8) B.H. Farmer, Pioneer Peasant Colonization in Ceylon. London : Oxford University Press, 1957
(9) Mick Moore, The State and Peasant Politics in Sri Lanka. Cambridge, U.P., 1985, p. 220
(10) Rohan Gunaratna, Sri Lanka, a Lost Revolution. Kandy, 1990, p. 93
(11) Gamini Samaranayake, Political Violence in Sri Lanka, 1971-1987. New Delhi, 2008 p. 254-267
(12) « The so-called left-wing leaders of our country have said that the peasantry is not revolutionary. These leaders will never understand the problems of Ceylon. Due to a failure to analyse the problems of the peasantry scientifically and accurately, there has been no attempt to establish a worker-peasant alliance nor any move to unit the entire oppressed class and to work towards a socialist revolution…It is only socialism that could permanently liberate the up-country landless peasant, the peasant in the wet zone whose crops are being constantly destroyed by the floods, the dry-zone peasant who is the victim of droughts, the agricultural labourers, chena (slash – and – burn) cultivators and sharecroppers. » (« The Peasantry is the Main force of the Ceylonese Revolution », Vimukthi, 4, September 1970.)
(13) The Khmer Rouge leader Khieu Samphan obtained a doctorate in Economy in Paris in 1959 for a dissertation on Cambodia’s economy, which was later eagerly read by the group of Cambodian students (the text is available in English translation at Cornell U.P., 1979) ; he belonged to a proto-maoist group in which the French-reunionnais Jacques Vergès played a prominent role ; the Maison du Cambodge where they all stayed became for a few years the scene of constant incidents between warring factions, especially after 1968 and was eventually closed for 30 years in 1973 ; I met there a few Sri Lankan JVPers in the early 1970s.

Landgrabbing by coffee estates in the Kägalla district, by Eric Meyer

After « The 1934-1935 Malaria Epidemic in Sri Lanka » (http://slkdiaspo.hypotheses.org/1251) and « Gamperaliya in the Kägalla district » (http://slkdiaspo.hypotheses.org/1354), we publish here the third paper in a series on the socio-economic history of the Kägalla district.
Download the paper here:
Coffee estates Kegalle