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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Land sales by the Crown

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Forsythe to H. Wace, 27.10.1889. Nahalma Estate

“My dear Wace,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Galboda-Kinigoda      7926                6668                                       889                 369

Paranakuru                 3912                1483                                        1255               1174

Beligal                        13933              3883                4989                1587               3473

Three-korales             17365              1230                9315                5817               1003   

Total                           43140              13266              14304              9548               6019

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

The Wahakula sittuwa

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

A freak case: the formation of Yataderiya and Knavesmire estates

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Davidson facing the planters.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

The formation of Karandupona, Madeniya and Golinda estates

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

*

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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

[2] Diary Kä 12 .12.1885

[3] Diary Kä 17.05.1884

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

[5] W. Forsythe in Times of Ceylon 11.02.1937

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

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

[8] Diary Kä, 26.05.1886 and 15.07.1886

[9] Diary Kä, 16.06.1886

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

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

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

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

[14] Diary Kä 3.06.1893 

[15] Diary Kä, 14.07.1891, 25.05.1892, 10.06.1892 

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

[17] Diary Kä 20.11.1885, 17.01.1886, 7.02.1886

[18] Diary Kä 16.10.1894 and 7.03.1895

[19] AR Kä 1885, p. 167A-168A

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

[21] AR Kä 1886, p. 147A-149A

[22] AR Kä 1892, p. J6

[23] SLNA 65/173

[24] Diary Kä, 6.05 – 24.06 1886

[25] Diary Kä, 28.07.1886, 8.09.1886, 10.09.1892

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

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

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

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

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

[31] Diary Kä, 25.06.1886

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

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

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

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

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

[37] Diary Kä, 26.04.1894

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

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

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

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

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

 

[43] AR Kä 1892, p. J6

[44] Diary Kä, 3.12.1892

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

[46] Diary Kä 3.01.1896, 18-19.03.1896

[47] AR Kä 1896 p. J16

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

[49] Diary Kä, 25.11-31.12.1896

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[57] SLNA 65/1187

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

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

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

[61] SLNA 30/482

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

[69] SLNA 30/508, 30/564

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

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

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

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

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

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

[76] In SLNA 30/868

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

[78] SLNA 30/544

[79] SLNA 30/545

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

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

[82] SLNA 30/478

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[93] Diary Kä, 27-28.10.1914

[94] Diary Kä 17.07.1922

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

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

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

[98] Ceylon Secretariat file L205/1926

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

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

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

[102] Diary Kä, 15.08.1898,

[103] Diary Kä, 19.01.1904

[104] Diary Kä 30/03/1905, 26/02/1906

[105] SLNA 30/574

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

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

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

[109] Diary Kä 1.02.1918, 16.07.1918

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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