Contesting conjugality. Sinhalese marriage practices in Dutch colonial population registration and courts ----do not cite!---- Jan Kok, Dries Lyna, Nadeera Rupesinghe & Luc Bulten Paper for XXVIII IUSSP International Population Conference Session “ Counting colonial populations” 3 november 2017 Cape Town Contesting conjugality. Sinhalese marriage practices in Dutch colonial population registration and courts Jan Kok, Dries Lyna, Nadeera Rupesinghe & Luc Bulten The case of the Dutch colony of Ceylon in the 18th century offers a fine opportunity to study the dynamics of administrative control in a colonial setting. The Dutch refined the traditional Sinhalese (and subsequently Portuguese) administration of population and landed properties, resulting in a complex combination of census, cadastre and genealogy. Sizeable collections of these so-called thombos have survived and allow us to analyse the interaction between the colonizers and the colonized; what categories were defined to label people, their occupations, and land? Why and how did the ‘subaltern’ population cooperate, to what extent could they influence or resist their categorization according to hierarchies of family, caste and feudal labour relations? In this paper we focus on the registration of marital status in the colonial population registers. Sinhalese marriage forms were striking different from what the Calvinist Dutch considered appropriate, and include cohabitation before marriage, easy divorce and polyandry. Did the Dutch mark this ´deviance´ in their registration? More important than morality, however, was business, which in this case, was dependent on the proper fulfilment and transmission of labour services attached to land. This could be endangered by unclear legal family relations and by the Sinhalese concept of ´temporary´ inheritance. How did the Dutch avoid such ambiguity? Finally, colonial administrators and lawyers had to be practical to run the colony as efficient as possible. In practice, they accepted many of the traditional family arrangements of the Sinhalese. The latter, on the other hand, often used the Dutch rules to improve their individual position, not in the least against their own kin. To study how conjugality was defined, and how it was contested by colonizer and colonized alike, we analyse the instructions to census takers, the actual categories as they differ across regions, and court cases. The quality of the population administration will be assessed with the use of a database in which we have entered the data for about 200 villages. Keywords: marriage, Ceylon, thombos, 18th century, courts 1. Introduction Colonial rulers did not leave the intimate sphere of sex, marriage and household in peace. Far from it: European notions of family were integral to the imperial, civilizing mission (Stoler, 2002). Ceylon is no exception, although in the minds of the Portuguese and Dutch occupying the island since, respectively, 1505 and 1640, commercial interests were foremost. For Christian Europeans, many aspects of Sinhalese marriage practices would have been bewildering. In their view, marriage was not taken very seriously by the Sinhalese. People considered themselves married after a trial period, and when things did not work out, divorce was very easy. Robert Knox, who had spent twenty years in (more or less luxurious) captivity in Kandy, wrote in 1681 that ‘their Marriages are but of little force or validity. For if they disagree and mislike one another; they part without disgrace´ (1681/1966, pp. 176–177). This very informal marriage could lead to all kinds of confusion, which also might have legal implications. For instance, in 1818 the Kandy court heard the case of Appurala vs. his wife in which a couple having cohabitated for seven years fought over the question of whether they were actually married or not (Pieris, 1956, p. 197). More shocking to the moral sensitivity of Europeans was the sharing of a wife by several brothers, which, according to a Portuguese captain was ´very ridiculous´: the husband has no greater claim on his wife than his brothers have; if he finds her alone, he takes her for himself, but if one of his brothers is with her, he cannot disturb them. Thus, one wife is sufficient for the whole family and all their property is in common among them, they bring their earnings into one general stock, and the children call their brothers indifferently their fathers´ (Ribeyro 1685/1847, p.60). The Calvinist Dutch were not likely to be lenient on these forms of ´immoral´ behaviour. In their own country, the ´Politieke Ordonnantie´ of 1580 regulated marriage quite strictly, and Church and State worked closely together to stamp out fornication, adultery, incest and cohabitation. How did they deal with the Ceylonese traditional marriage practices, especially of those who were converted and baptised? How did the Ceylonese respond to alien European concepts of what constituted a marriage? Was it even possible for the Dutch to change indigenous practices? To be sure, the government apparatus of the Dutch East India Company (Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie, VOC) was minimal, and the cooperation of the population was always necessary to reap the benefits of investments in merchant operations. Pressuring the Sinhalese into abandoning cherished practices would have been an unwise policy. Yet, the VOC had another, and even more compelling reason to control Sinhalese marriages, at least up to a point. Groups of family members occupied plots of land to which, from ancient times, feudal services and taxes were attached. The preservation of this feudal system was essential to the Dutch colonial economy in Ceylon. It was imperative that the rulers knew who inherited these ´service´ lands, and thus who was responsible. Sinhalese inheritance followed its own (unwritten) rules, which were, again, very distinct from the Dutch. Ensuring the continuance of (labor) service, the rules defining marriage, legal offspring, and inheritance needed to be as unequivocal as possible. But in doing so, the Dutch depended on cooperation from the local elite, and as these were not always to be trusted, even more from the population at large. This implied finding a modus vivendi, some common ground between two cultural and legal systems, obviously not based on equality. In practice, this meant that many disputes surrounding marriage and inheritance were settled according to Sinhalese rules (Rupesinghe 2016). In this article, we analyse how Sinhalese marriage was contested, and what this contestation tells us about the interaction between the colonizer and the colonized. We will look at the ways the Dutch formalized Sinhalese marriages, how they registered marriage in their population administrations, and how they sanctioned but also accommodated those who did not comply with Christian norms. We will also look at the reactions of the Sinhalese to the categories constituting formal marriage imposed on them, which became apparent especially in court cases. The court records contain many cases of Sinhalese using the new rules against each other, thus Dutch legal definitions of marriage became weapons in strategies to claim legitimacy or inheritance. How was marriage defined, how were married people and their (legal) offspring registered and separated from non-married couples, and how did people react to this infringement of their customs? We look for answers in court cases, especially those from the Landraad (Land council). This was a judicial forum that mostly dealt with conflicts related to land ownership, and the accompanying taxes and duties. It was used extensively by litigants. We study cases from the Landraad of Galle, which were also linked to the thombos of six villages in Hinidum pattu in Galle korale (Rupesinghe 2016). Moreover, we use court cases from the Landraad of Colombo, as well as Colombo´s Council of Justice, a court of appeal. Last but not least, we analyse a database covering the thombos of almost two hundred villages in the Colombo province (see also Drixler and Kok 2016). In the next section, we will introduce the origin and functioning of Dutch colonial bureaucracy in coastal Ceylon in greater detail. Then, we discuss how Sinhalese and Dutch marriage practices and norms differed and clashed. In section four we show how the colonial administration dealt with Sinhalese marriage in parish records and census- type registrations. Section five will discuss revealing court cases from Colombo and Galle. We will see how the definition of marriage plays a crucial role in establishing one´s legal position – and by extension one´s property claims, opportunities for social mobility and power relations – within the colonial society of Ceylon. 2. The Dutch population registration in Ceylon Till recently, the governance policy of the Dutch East India Company in their colonies was often underestimated to be no more than the maintenance of their trade posts, purely motivated by economic revenue and profits (Schrikker, 2006, pp. 1-3; Vink, 2007, pp. 56). Yet, already in 1978 Jurrien van Goor showed in his dissertation on Dutch education in Ceylon between 1690 and 1795, that the colonial government of Dutch Ceylon went to far greater lengths to govern both the large territory they inherited from the Portuguese and its population. He showed that the Dutch tried to commit the indigenous people to the Dutch cause through schooling. They did this by attempting to convert the native residents of the island to Protestantism, to spread the usage of the Dutch language and through the implementation of a administrative system. They did not succeed in spreading the Dutch language among the local population, but the other two strategies met with greater success (Goor, 1978). The Dutch parish registers were connected to the Protestant schools, which the local elites attended in order to succeed in the native government under the VOC. These registers, better known as schoolthombos, were to become a core instrument for the colonial government to gain insight into the composition of the rural villages beyond the de facto reach of the Dutch controlled-littoral (Reimers, 1950; also Dewasiri, 2007).