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

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

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

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

The third to Ceylonese landowners facing the crisis

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

 

 

PART 1

 EXOGENOUS CRISIS, ENDOGENOUS CRISIS

THE GENESIS AND DIFFUSION

OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION

 

 

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

 

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

 

 

THE LIMITS OF GROWTH.

 

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

 

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

 

 

From the old ecological regime to the new economic system

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

The rise of small producers.

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

Sinhalese day labourers on the plantations

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

 

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

The agrarian question

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

 

 

THE DEPRESSION’S PROGRESS

 

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

 

 

Dependence on exports

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

The public finance crisis

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

The two sides of the same crisis.

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[15] AR Registrar of Cooperative Societies 1933

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

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

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

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

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

[21] AR Tea Controller 1938 annex A. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[30] CEYLON Sessional Paper 3 of 1931

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

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

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

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

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

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

[37] AR Sabaragamuwa 1907 p. I2

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

[39] SV Kurunägala p. 2 sq.

[40] AR Sabaragamuwa 1916

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

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

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

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

 

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

[46] Diary ASO Sandys, 20.05.1930

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[55] Diary ASO Sandys, 29.07.1930

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[62] CO54/903/3 dispatch n° 571

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

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

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

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

[67] AR Kägalla 1919

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[75] COREA 1975 chapter IV

 

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

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

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

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

[80] CBC II p.459.

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

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

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

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

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.