The Adaptable Peasant TAMO-9-dewasiri.indd i 22-10-2007 11:28:13 TANAP Monographs on the History of Asian-European Interaction Edited by Leonard Blussé and Cynthia Viallé VOLUME 9 TAMO-9-dewasiri.indd ii 22-10-2007 11:28:13 The Adaptable Peasant Agrarian Society in Western Sri Lanka under Dutch Rule, 1740-1800 By Nirmal Ranjith Dewasiri LEIDEN • BOSTON 2008 TAMO-9-dewasiri.indd iii 22-10-2007 11:28:13 The TANAP programme is funded by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO). This book is printed on acid-free paper. A C.I.P. record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISSN 1871-6938 ISBN 978 90 04 16508 3 Copyright 2008 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Hotei Publishing, IDC Publishers, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers and VSP. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill NV provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. printed in the netherlands TAMO-9-dewasiri.indd iv 22-10-2007 11:28:13 v Dedicated to my Mother and Father vi BLANCO vii SERIES EDITOR’S FOREWORD Probably nowhere in the world have such profound changes in historio- graphy been occurring as in the nation states of Monsoon Asia that gained independence after the conclusion of the Pacific War in 1945. These tra- ditionally outward-looking countries on the rims of the Indian Ocean and the Eastern Seas have been interacting with each other through maritime transport and trade for more than two millennia, but the exi- gencies of modern nation-building have tended to produce state-centred historical narratives that emphasise a distinctive heritage and foster cultural pride and identity on the basis of such heroic themes as anti-colo- nial resistance. No one will deny the need for and utility of such ‘nation- building’ agendas, but an inward-directed national historiography does not necessarily prepare one’s citizens for our present age of regional co- operation and globalisation. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the coastal societies of Monsoon Asia witnessed the entry of European traders, the emergence of global maritime trading networks, and the laying of the foundations of colonial empires that reached their apogees in the nineteenth and twen- tieth centuries. The difficulties of studying this pre-colonial and early colonial past should not be underestimated. Local sources are often rare because of wars and the frequent changes of both indigenous and colonial regimes. The hot and humid tropical climate is also unkind to the preser- vation of manuscripts. The mass of western-language data preserved in the archives of the former East India Companies and those of the Spanish and Portuguese empires in Asia often have an undeniably Europe-centred character and bias. Thus we face not only a highly imbalanced supply of source material, but also the very complex problem of how to decode the hidden agendas that often colour these primary materials. Over the past fifty years there has been a pronounced effort in academ- ic circles in North America, Australia and the former European colonial nations to ‘decolonize’ historical writing on Asian-European interaction, albeit for reasons totally different from those in their Asian counterparts. Increasingly doubt has been cast on such longstanding paradigms as the superiority of the dynamic West over static Asian societies. Historians of international trade such as the late Holden Furber, whose description of this period as ‘The Age of Partnership’ inspired the name of the TANAP programme, have taken an interest in the various ways and means by which Asian-European interaction began in various kinds of competition, rivalry, collaboration, diplomacy, and military confrontation. This viii SERIES EDITOR’S FOREWORD approach has forced historians to return to the archival sources and the places where these events unfolded with the result that new frontiers of research have opened up in which close partnerships between Asian and European historians, with their specific cultural tool kits and linguistic backgrounds, are now starting to bear fruit. In anticipation of the four hundredth anniversary of the establishment of the Dutch East India Company in 1602, members of the History Department of Leiden University proposed the establishment of an inter- national research programme aimed at training a new generation of Asian historians of Asian-European interaction in the early modern period. It was taken for granted that any such drive towards international educa- tional co-operation should be carried out in carefully planned collabora- tion with the National Archives in The Hague, the Arsip Nasional of the Republic of Indonesia in Jakarta, and the archives of Cape Town (South Africa), Colombo (Sri Lanka), and Chennai (India), which together hold several kilometres of archival records from the former Verenigde Oost- indische Compagnie. The TANAP—Towards a New Age of Partnership —educational and archival preservation programme was started in 2000 thanks to generous grants from the Dutch Ministry of Education, Culture and Science, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Netherlands Organi- zation for Scientific Research (NWO), the Netherlands Foundation for the Advancement of Tropical Research (WOTRO), the Netherlands UNESCO Commission, and Leiden University. Twelve universities in Asia sent some thirty young lecturers to Leiden during 2001-2003. Under the auspices of the Research Institute for Asian-African and Amerindian Studies (CNWS), these historians participated in an advanced master’s programme that included intensive courses on historiography, palaeo- graphy, and the old Dutch written language. With additional funding from several Asian foundations, in 2002 seventeen of the TANAP graduates from Sri Lanka, India, Singapore, Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam, China, Taiwan, Japan, South Africa, and the Netherlands began working towards a Ph.D. degree at Leiden. Three others went on to pursue their doctorates at universities elsewhere in the world. The TANAP Monographs on the History of Asian-European Inter- action, which include two studies on early modern South African society, are the offspring of their doctoral theses defended at Leiden. Leonard Blussé, Leiden University ix CONTENTS Acknowledgements xv Notes to the reader xviii Glossary xix Maps xxiii Prologue 1 Introduction 3 Historical setting 4 Historiography 10 Conceptualising the ‘peasant’ in the context of the colonial hegemony 13 Some methodological issues 15 Sources 19 Organisation of chapters 22 Chapter One: The World of the Peasant 25 Everyday life of the peasant 25 Links with the outside world 29 The world of the peasant and external forces 32 Demographic patterns 33 The horizons of the peasant’s life 42 Gama: What’s in a name? 43 The boundaries and the geographical sense of gama 47 The internal setting of the village 49 1. The internal setting of Kahambilihena 53 2. The v¯asagama group and the internal setting of gama 55 3. Caste in the internal setting of the gama 57 Some concluding remarks 57 Chapter Two: The System of Production and Its Changes 59 Level of rice production 59 Three systems of production 62 Changing patterns of land utilisation in the peasant production 63 1. Company policy towards chena cultivation 65 2. The changing role of gardens 67 Coconut, areca nut, and jak trees as garden crops 70 The market for garden crops 76 x CONTENTS Plantations as a new mode of land consumption 77 1. The rise and fall of cinnamon plantations 78 2. Ownership of cinnamon plantations 81 3. Coconut plantations 82 Changing aspects of the traditional labour organisation 84 1. Colonial rule and the social division of labour 88 2. Draining labour out of peasant production through r¯ajak¯ariya 93 3. Labour supply for plantations 99 4. Changing labour relations among manufacturing and service castes 102 Some concluding remarks 102 Chapter Three: Land Tenure and Its Changes 105 The main features of pre-colonial land tenure 107 The land tenure system as found in the tombos 109 1. Parav¯eni lands 110 2. Lands that belong to the ‘lord of the land’ 111 3. Principal Land Holders (PLH) 113 4. Absentee Principal Land Holders 114 Changes in the land tenure 116 A historical explanation of the change 118 Accommodessan grants 125 The theory and practice of the concept of bhupati 131 Summary of structural changes that occurred in traditional land tenure under the Dutch administration 136 Chapter Four: The Emergence of a New Class Formation and the Rise of a Landowning Class 141 Prelude to the new class differentiation 141 Class structure of the Ogodapola formation 145 Class structure of Mapitigama 155 Some comparative observations on the class structure in Ogodapola formation and Mapitigama 167 The rise of the landowning class 170 1. Numerical strength of the landowning class 172 2. Sources of economic power of the landowning class 174 3. Modes of acquisition of lands by the landowning class 176 4. Labour mobilisation by the landowning class 179 5. Production process of the lands of the landowning class 180 Some concluding remarks 181 Chapter Five: Caste and Social Mobility 185 Caste in a colonial context 185 CONTENTS xi Caste communities and hierarchies 186 1. Revisiting caste hierarchy: some problems in the history and historiography 187 2. The Goyigama caste and the ritual order 192 3. Perpetuation of caste distinction 197 Caste formation in the mid-eighteenth century 199 1. Some features of the geographical distribution of castes 202 2.