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

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

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

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

The third to Ceylonese landowners facing the crisis

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

 

 

PART 1

 EXOGENOUS CRISIS, ENDOGENOUS CRISIS

THE GENESIS AND DIFFUSION

OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION

 

 

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

 

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

 

 

THE LIMITS OF GROWTH.

 

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

 

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

 

 

From the old ecological regime to the new economic system

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

The rise of small producers.

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

Sinhalese day labourers on the plantations

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

 

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

The agrarian question

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

 

 

THE DEPRESSION’S PROGRESS

 

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

 

 

Dependence on exports

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

The public finance crisis

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

The two sides of the same crisis.

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[15] AR Registrar of Cooperative Societies 1933

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

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

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

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

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

[21] AR Tea Controller 1938 annex A. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[30] CEYLON Sessional Paper 3 of 1931

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

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

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

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

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

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

[37] AR Sabaragamuwa 1907 p. I2

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

[39] SV Kurunägala p. 2 sq.

[40] AR Sabaragamuwa 1916

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

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

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

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

 

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

[46] Diary ASO Sandys, 20.05.1930

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[55] Diary ASO Sandys, 29.07.1930

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[62] CO54/903/3 dispatch n° 571

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

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

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

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

[67] AR Kägalla 1919

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[75] COREA 1975 chapter IV

 

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

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

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

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

[80] CBC II p.459.

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

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

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

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

“Coolie Poesis: Plantation Sounds and Labor Heritage on Sri Lanka’s Tea Estates” by Mythri Jegathesan (UC Davis College of Letters and Science)

Mythri Jegathesan at the UC Davis Global Tea Initiative for Tea Culture and Science 2nd Annual Colloquium: “The Sensory Aspects of Tea” on January 19, 2017. This talk explores the relationship between tea plantation labor and production and coolie identity formation and heritage in Sri Lanka. Also how the human voice—through the poetry, and song written and performed by Tamil plantation residents—reinforce coolie narratives of labor, connectivity, and desires for social recognition in a multicultural, postwar Sri Lanka. This reinforcement creates a coolie poesis—an emergence of a complex labor heritage to be duly acknowledged in Sri Lanka’s colonial and postcolonial history and present.

source: UC Davis College of Letters and Science

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

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

by Eric P. Meyer

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

*

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

*

 

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

 

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

 

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

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

 

 

 

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

https://slkdiaspo.hypotheses.org/6732; “The Ceylon land settlement department and its fight against land speculation from 1897 to 1930” https://slkdiaspo.hypotheses.org/6950; “Towards a new land policy in the Kandyan regions: from the Ceylon Land Commission of 1927-1928 to the Kandyan Peasantry Commission of 1949-1950” https://slkdiaspo.hypotheses.org/6972

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

[3] Ceylon sessional paper n° 43 of 1882

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

[5] Ceylon sessional paper n° 12 of 1921

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

[7] Ceylon Hansard, 13.12.1934 p. 3204

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

[9] CO54/432, 12.01.1868

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

[17] Ceylon Sessional paper n° 6 of 1908

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[30] SLNA 6/10290, 18.10.1897

[31] CO54/637 (18.02.1897)

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

[33]   Administration report Sabaragamuwa 1932 p.I7

“150 Years Later: the story of tea” by The Centre for Policy Alternatives (CPA)

In 2017, we celebrate 150 years of tea production in Sri Lanka. To mark this anniversary, several events and activities have been planned throughout the year in Sri Lanka and internationally, including a Global Tea Party, International Tea Convention and a charity auction organised by a variety of stakeholders such as the Ceylon Tea Traders Association, Sri Lanka Tea Board, Tourist Board and tea companies.

While there is much reported in the media around these events, the anniversary celebrations and the future of Ceylon tea, there is little to no mention whatsoever of the tea plantation workers without whose contribution the industry would not exist.

There has been a lot of research and advocacy for decades on the rights of tea plantation workers, life conditions, wages and hardships faced by the workers and their families. In comparison to other parts of Sri Lanka, poverty, nutrition, maternal and children’s health statistics of plantation communities are poorer and further exacerbated by issues related to inadequate housing, alcoholism, gender based violence and unemployment especially among youth. Opinion polls conducted by the Centre for Policy Alternatives show that the community is badly impacted by the economy, have made serious cut backs in the household expenditure and feel little sense of empowerment as citizens of the country.

GroundviewsVikalpa and Maatram have previously created new media stories, in all three languages across their respective platforms, that highlight the hardships faced by the tea plantation workers.

With the objective of creating more visibility and awareness and to ensure that key narratives do not remain invisible during this significant anniversary, CPA’s civic media output over four weeks will be anchored to key issues facing the tea plantation workers to coincide with the 150-year anniversary celebrations in order to take advantage of the momentum gathered by the celebrations. As Sri Lanka strategises the future of the tea industry, it is critical that the official discussions and reflections seriously consider issues faced by the workers who sustain the industry. The output will focus on the change (or lack thereof) in the lives of the workers 150 years since the start the industry, including a plethora of issues faced by them and their families, challenges for the future, areas for reform and strengthening rights. Content will be in all three languages, through short-form video, photography, long-form journalism and other interactive media.

Download this statement here.

source: The Centre for Policy Alternatives (CPA)