Contradictions in Nation-Building: The Story of the Kandyans

Advent of a Plantation Economy in Ceylon

After the signing of the historic Kandyan Convention in 1815, the British were prepared to enjoy the economic dividends of a completely captured land, with the Kandyan pocket of independence fragmenting the otherwise conquered country now safely out of the way. The Maritime Provinces that had been under them for centuries were already yielding profits from cinnamon, salt and trade through the ports. What was now left was the hitherto unexplored hinterland of the island, whose fertile soil and cool climes were ideal for coffee—and later tea—plantation. However, the British soon realised that hindrances came in more than the political form.

Primary among them was the Kandyan caste structure, whose ideological force—despite its oppressive nature—proved to be a great obstacle to obtaining the necessary labour for the plantations. Caste in the Kandyan kingdom was defined primarily by occupation, and the highest caste was the Goyigama (farmer caste), whose upper stratum constituted the nobility (Radala). Kingship was a different matter. There were times when Kings—and entire dynasties, at times—were ‘imported’ from South India in order to mitigate the risk of intra-elite rivalry over succession (Schrikker 2007). The aforementioned Goyigama caste accommodated further subdivisions depending on the degree of royal favour a family received over time. Thus, those with the most lands and property holdings (implying the highest royal favour for a very long time) constituted the Radala subdivision (nobility), followed by four other subdivisions, the lowest of which was the peasantry (nonetheless considered to be of ‘high birth’) who were mandated to supply agricultural produce, mostly rice, for the palace and the greater nobility. Then there were the service castes—the drummers, the goldsmiths, the washers and so on—all of whom were bound to the system by the tradition of service tenure, which required the son to engage in the same profession as the father.

The abolishment of this system of service tenure through the Colebrook–Cameron reforms of 1833, though packaged in egalitarian language, was really a move to free the labour force from the archaic ties that bound them, in the interest of capitalist expansion (Jayawardena 2000). The British, however, failed to appreciate that the old system was kept in place not just by royal decree, but also by the force of ideology. Hence, even when labour was ideally free to move about, the Kandyan people did not find this new ‘liberating’ alternative appealing because ‘[a]mong the Sinhalese, a peasant cultivator of paddy land held a much higher status than a landless labourer. In addition, the low wages paid to hired workers failed to attract the Kandyan peasant, and the peak season for harvesting plantation coffee usually coincided with the peasant’s own harvest’ (Nubin 2002, 114). The crisis mounted to the extent that South Indian Tamil labourers were brought to Ceylon to sustain the plantations, leading to serious demographic—and later political—changes in the island.

The service economy that sprang around the plantations through transportation infrastructure, the timber industry (for railroads), toddy distilling (for workers), et cetera, also resulted in huge sociocultural changes in the Kandyan regions. Jayawardena (2000) provides an extensive account of how the low-country Sinhalese utilised these opportunities presented by the new colonial economy to rise to heights of affluence that later afforded them access to national politics as well:

In the Central Province there were eight arrack farms. The renters of these areas in the 1830s were outsiders from the coastal regions. Jeronis Soysa…his brother Susew Soysa…Balappuwaduge Cornelis and Domingo Mendis, Mahamarakkala Patabandige James Cooray, Swarisge Cornelis Swaris, Sellaperumage Abraham Fernando, Weerahennedige Alexander Fernando and J. F. Rodrigo Tambypulle. (ibid, 80)

What is noticeable about this list of names is that all of them came from the fisher caste of the coastal regions, known as Karava, and made their fortunes in the Kandyan regions. Significant low-country presence in the Kandyan areas marked by these developments was further consolidated by later generations of low-country Sinhalese who captured the business landscape of the area, particularly in the city of Kandy, married into Kandyan families and continue their business ventures to date. In the next section, I explore the myriad implications of these developments for Kandy and its social fabric.

Ramifications of the Plantations for Kandy

An important spin-off of the plantations, and one that had a particularly decisive impact on Kandy’s evolving perception of itself, was the system of roads and railroads it gave rise to. It was used primarily to ensure that the cash crops reached the ports without delay, from whence they would leave for their overseas markets, but it also had strong socio-economic and geographic ramifications. Especially the direct political impact of the geographical integration they resulted in warrants special mention. It would be incorrect to say that the modes of transportation led to geo-administrative integration. Rather, calculations of integrating Kandy to the rest of the island were instrumental in prompting the British decision to build a road connecting Kandy to Colombo. Munasinghe (2002) notes that the inaccessibility of the lands in the hills, and the luxury it afforded rebel groups to organise themselves to challenge the imperial government in 1817–1818, were the immediate triggers of the need for a direct route of access to Kandyan areas. Therefore, the Kandy-Colombo highway was supposed to ‘remove the principal difficulties that were experienced in the late military operations [and to] destroy the confidence of the people [in the protection offered by the inaccessibility of the terrain]’ (Governor Barnes, personal correspondence to Earl Barthurst 19 May 1820, and to the Commissioners of Inquiry 7 November 1830, as cited in Munasinghe 2002, 7).

In contrast, the Kandy-Colombo railway was built exclusively for economic purposes. It was meant to reduce the costs incurred by plantation owners in the transport of their produce by way of storage, wastage and delays (ibid). The railway served this end well enough but, in addition, was also successful in further opening up the Kandyan areas geographically. Munasinghe explores the process of change that took place directly as a result of the expansion of railways thus;

[t]he growth of towns as service centres, the introduction of a large agricultural labouring class depending almost wholly on the market for the purchase of goods, requisites, the increasing circulation of currency, availability of new goods and services in the interior and purchasing power of the population, was all rapidly leading to the breakdown of subsistence agriculture and village self-sufficiency. This was replaced by a money economy where trade and exchange were important…by 1911…the bazaar towns and townlets had boutiques selling a varied range of goods, from US cigarette-tins to Famora soap (261). Inevitably, the highlands were flooded with people from across the country as well as from South India, so much so that by 1911 the Kandy Municipality alone had 9,339 low-country Sinhalese, 1,983 Sri Lankan Tamils and 3,592 Sri Lankan Moors compared to 6,594 Kandyan Sinhalese. (ibid, 266)

These socio-economic changes the plantations brought about constituted the core of all the grievances Kandyans experienced under colonial rule. Bringing in Indian Tamil labourers drastically altered the demographic and economic fabric of local society; the infrastructural demands of the plantations were readily met by the low-country Sinhalese, who were by now well versed in the art of commerce, having had centuries of prior trade experience with European powers that colonised the maritime areas; Kandyan soil was fast being appropriated to support the ever-expanding plantations, much to the detriment of smallholders whose subsistence was largely, if not completely, dependent upon the land (Kanapathipillai 2009). As early as 1869 the Assistant Agent at Kegalle spoke of ‘a surplus population, a population which cannot derive subsistence from its labour’ (Wickramasinghe 2006, 56). ‘Following the paddy tax, evictions had occurred in Badulla and Nuwara Eliya and the peasants who lost their paddy fields were nearest the subsistence level. In the Kegalle district village land was sold to estates and a landless class of labourers was in the making’ (ibid). The dominance of the low-country Sinhalese in the service economy of the plantations meant that ‘[t]he Kandyan Sinhalese soon found themselves left far behind in getting a share of the economic opportunities and prosperity that accompanied colonialism’ (Kanapathipillai 2009). These developments ultimately led to a sense of deprivation in the Kandyan mindset where their lands were understood as having been ‘looted’ from them and used for an economic system whose benefits were enjoyed by everyone other than themselves.

Economic marginalisation was later translated into political powerlessness as well. Jayawardena (2000) shows how the low-country Sinhalese families that made their fortunes on Kandyan soil then moved on to being involved in legislative affairs, thanks to being able to meet the property requirements laid down by the colonial government to be entitled to the franchise (and later, limited self-government). Among the Europeans and low-country Sinhalese who were the major beneficiaries of these developments, most of Kandyan antipathy was channelled towards the latter. What is more, the Kandyans by the end of the nineteenth century actually preferred the plantation Tamils over the low-country Sinhalese (Hoole 1998) as a result of the economic displacement they were suffering:

The crux of the discord between Kandyan and Low-Country Sinhalese was the discrepancy, real or perceived, in the distribution both of de jure power resources—that is, the power resources which accrued to each individual by virtue of his or her citizenship in the state, in particular the right and ability to petition the government and organize political action—and of de facto power resources such as education and wealth. (Wickramasinghe 2006, 56)

The direct geographic and economic impact of the plantations, and their later sociopolitical spin-offs, were crucial, therefore, in giving rise to a grievance consciousness that helped in the gradual internalisation of the emerging Kandyan identity. However, these same demographic revisions later led to ‘mixing Kandy up’ with the low-country in population terms. In addition, the export-based plantation economy subsequently resulted in a ‘national’ economy of which Kandy was also a part, aiding the process of integration. In the next section, I introduce a further dimension to this process of integration, namely British administrative reforms and their impact on Kandy’s identity.

British Administrative Policies in the Formation and Decline of Kandyan Identity

Even though it was the British who first administratively demarcated an identity called ‘Kandyan’, it was not without historical precedence. The kingdom in the hills with Kandy as its capital was but the inevitable successor to the Sinhala kingdom whose capital changed constantly to evade conquest by South Indian invaders (Malalgoda 1976), understood by the Sinhala community living even in coastal areas as their capital city. Wickramasinghe (2006) observes that even when the coastal line was under the Portuguese, Sinhalese living in those areas ‘emphasized the Kandyan king’s over lordship over the territory… [and in] some of the Matara writings emanating from the lowlands…the kings of the Kandyan kingdom were praised as though the poets lived in an area under Kandyan rule rather than under Dutch colonial rule’ (11). However, there is evidence that the Dutch attempted to establish a Kandyan-low country distinction as a strategy to counter the emergence of an overarching consciousness of ‘indigeneity’ during the rule of Kirti Sri Rajasimha, because the latter’s hand in resurrecting Buddhism in the island was generating sentiments of loyalty in Buddhists both within and outside of the geographical boundaries of the kingdom (Dewaraja 1972, 119). Official recognition of this identity, and a fairly specific (albeit confused) understanding of what it constituted, was the result of British intervention. A separate identity as ‘Kandyans’ was first officially established in Ceylon’s history by the British in the 1901 census, where they included residents of the Central, Uva, Sabaragamuwa and North Central provinces as people belonging to that entity (Wickramasinghe 2006). As mentioned before, the British initiated a host of administrative reforms following the conquest, including centralising the country and dividing it into five administrative provinces with Colombo, Galle, Jaffna, Batticaloa and Kandy as their respective capitals, ostensibly to enable administrative expediency. The real reason behind this division, however, was ‘to prevent any possible resurgence of Kandyan nationalism by cutting it off from the various branches of the erstwhile Kandyan kingdom with each of them attached to the remaining four provinces’ (Sebastian 2004, 126). In this demarcation of provinces, it is clear that ‘there was no [other] historical, geographical or demographic consideration’ (ibid).

The resultant gradual aggravation of Kandy’s victim mentality and the consolidation of an identity based on such was greatly aided by a figure in the colonial bureaucracy: Governor Manning. Manning’s interest was really in splitting the Ceylon National Congress (CNC), which he regarded as ‘an intolerable challenge’ (De Silva 1981, 390). As such, he took painstaking efforts to convince the Kandyans ‘that they, like the Moors and Tamils, were a minority’ (Welhengama and Pillai 2014, 83). He went so far as to declare that separate electorates should be created for the Kandyan provinces and constitutional safeguards should be put in place to protect Kandyans from low-country political encroachment (ibid). He is also believed to be a chief architect of the Kandyan National Alliance (KNA) created in 1925 (ibid), and put the full weight of his office behind the subsequent Kandyan federal demand. Egged on by Manning—and indeed by the setbacks they suffered due to the advent of the plantation economy—the Kandyans demanded federal autonomy from the Donoughmore Commission that took evidence from the locals before introducing universal franchise to Ceylon in 1931. In fact, their sentiments of distinction by this time were so strong that they referred to the low-country Sinhalese as ‘Buddhists of other nations’ (Donoughmore Report, 134). The assault on Kandy’s confidence through fragmenting the territorial integrity of the erstwhile kingdom was directly linked with these feelings of insecurity and their culmination in a demand for federal autonomy. As the next section illustrates, these feelings of marginalisation further intensified with Colombo becoming the new nation’s capital.

Emergence of Colombo and Its Impact on Kandy

Colombo’s emergence as the capital of the new nation-state had serious implications for Kandy’s distinct status and its dissolution over time. Nihal Perera (1997) maps the construction of a new nation-state by the British through the use of Colombo ‘as the node from which to transform Ceylon into a unified political territory’ (25) such that it destroyed the ‘territorial self—or geo-body—of the last kingdom of Kandy, eliminating and subordinating the principle traces of indigenous political power and cultural identity’ (ibid). This development is important in understanding the gradual decline of Kandy’s spatial importance. Clearly, the administrative reorganisation of the island served to break the territorial integrity of the Kandyan kingdom, but its symbolic force was only truly compromised with the increasing importance of Colombo as the new capital, and the drawing of the boundaries of the new nation it connoted. With these developments, the sense of political community structured around Kandy (with even what is today called the ‘low-country’ looking up to Kandy as its capital) was gradually replaced with the idea of a Westphalian nation-state.

In this light, any consciousness of the political unit called the Kandyan kingdom would have naturally withered away, had the British not [partially inadvertently] created and fuelled a geo-cultural identity to define that kingdom. Based as this created identity was on grievances related to, inter alia, the administrative rearrangements geared towards undermining Kandy, such rearrangements were themselves responsible for the subsequent dilution of the geographic distinction of Kandy because they territorially tied various parts of Kandy to maritime areas.

The last dimension I intend to explore in this process, namely the role of Buddhism in this equation, is visited in the next section.

Buddhism, Ethnicity and the ‘Nation’

Buddhism has been central to Sri Lanka’s nation-building exercise, and it may be surprising to note that the strategic and pragmatic concerns of the early British days had a decisive impact on this state of affairs. Ceylon as a signifier of Buddhism in the world was largely inspired by the ‘structural irritations’ between the British East India Company and the Crown ‘and their need to define separate populations of subjects’ (Sivasundaram 2013, 30). In this quest, Buddhism ‘became de-linked from Hinduism in British thought, and this was in keeping with Lanka’s partitioning from the mainland’ (ibid, 23).

It is important to understand the context within which this reasoning takes place. The story begins with a proclamation made in 1796 by Robert Andrews, the Company officer in charge of revenues, who, due to his fears over the power of local village headmen in coastal areas, entrusted those duties to officers brought down from South India. These officers, and their aggressive taxation, led to open revolt and Ceylon’s governance was passed from the Company to the British Crown in 1798. Later, in 1815, troops from the mainland that were brought in to fight the Kandyan war answered to their own military chiefs, and not the Ceylonese Governor. In addition, they complained about their wages which, once converted, did not afford them much in India. In subsequent exchanges between the Governor and the Company, it was established that given the differences in exchange rates and resources available for troops, Ceylon constituted a landmass that was ‘foreign’ to India, and therefore wage rates for foreign deployment should apply to these troops (ibid, 55–56).

This may be understood as the advent of a long process of partitioning the island from the mainland, which later resulted in Buddhism being picked up as the central cultural marker that distinguished the former landmass from the latter. Needless to say that for the British, focusing on Buddhism was politically expedient as well. By extending imperial patronage to Buddhism, the British were in effect also portraying themselves as the successors to the royal line that ended with the Kandyan kingdom. In this equation, Kandy came to embody the ‘truly indigenous’ for the British, not just as the last native capital, but also as the last royal patron of Buddhism from whom that responsibility was understood as having been ‘transferred’ to the British, legitimising the latter’s rule.

Thus defined, the new nation came to be understood with Buddhism at its locus, which also over time coincided with the Sinhala ethnic stock whose religion was, in the main, Buddhism. The ‘millennial ideology of the Sinhalese as being a chosen people…with a mission to hold the entirety of this Island sacred to Buddhism’ (Hoole 2001, 6) thus became a central component of nation-building in Sri Lanka. The perceived centrality of Buddhism in the island’s identity provided the ideological vision for later anti-colonial struggles as well. In this connection, it is important to understand the role of Christianity in shaping the nature and function of Buddhism during the colonial era. Christianity was the key means by which the colonial cultural project of ‘civilising’ the natives was carried out. Missionary schools were central to this endeavour because they were the centres through which Enlightenment values and knowledge were imparted in the English medium. Politically, such education served to ‘indoctrinate the young Ceylonese elite with an Anglicized version of the rationalistic humanism of the Enlightenment’ (Bond 1992, 17), which was crucial to more firmly entrenching British presence in the island in the long term. Confronted with a religion that also constituted a powerful cultural force, and in fact a civilisational aspiration for many, Buddhism was pushed to produce an alternative that could rival the modernising promise of Christianity. The result has been termed ‘Protestant Buddhism’ (Gombrich and Obeysekera 1988), which refers simultaneously to the Buddhism that emerged as a ‘protest’ to the aggression of Christianity, as well as the Buddhism that imitated some Christian stances to the effect that it started mirroring Protestantism in some respects (ibid). The ethos of modernity induced in the local mindset by Christianity which Buddhism drew on during this process, then tied up the emerging nation-state, that distinctive product of modernist thinking, with this new reformed Buddhism that was finally fit to dictate the culture of a modern political unit.

This development is particularly useful in understanding the conflation of religious identity with national identity, a crucial factor in enabling Kandy’s integration to Sri Lanka’s nation-building project. This was clearly manifest in the Sinhala-Buddhist nationalism of the late-colonial era, whose chief architect may be identified as Anagarika Dharmapala—a prominent figure of the Buddhist revival movement in Sri Lanka (De Votta 2007). One finds many references in the latter’s speeches to a ‘Sinhalese [Buddhist] nation’ which he uses interchangeably with the ‘island nation’. In his attack on alcohol, Dharmapala urged the people to be like King Dutugemunu ‘who rescued Buddhism and our nation from oblivion’ (ibid, 15); in his glorification of the Buddhist civilisation in Sri Lanka he claimed that ‘no nation in the world has had a more brilliant history’ (ibid); in his explanation of why Ceylon was spared the brunt of colonial aggression he declared that Buddhism guarded the country from being exposed to such brutality and that Buddhism was the only reason why ‘the Sinhalese have not met with the fate of the Tasmanian, the African savage, or the North American Indian’ (ibid). This overarching ethnonationalist rhetoric was later crucial in Kandy being integrated with the larger Sinhala polity. What contributed to Kandy’s distinction as the ‘truly indigenous’ initially, then, was also instrumental in later integrating Kandy with the larger political community of the majority.

Post-Colonial Ethnic Politics and Implications for Kandy

The Ceylonese polity experienced heavy ethnicisation following the introduction of universal franchise through the Donoughmore reforms of 1931, a mere three years after it was introduced in Britain. The island’s seemingly cosmopolitan political outlook as reflected in the poly-ethnic CNC may have inspired British confidence (De Votta 2007). However, what they did not perhaps anticipate was the undemocratic turn the country would take once its political elites came to appreciate the numerical implications of expanding the franchise. As early as 1937, S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike created the Sinhala Maha Sabha, which later became the political vision of the ‘nation’, as narrowly understood by the mainstream polity (Roberts 2003). Prospects for ethnic politics for Sinhala politicians started to appear very promising in this early stage, ‘[s]ince the State Council was elected by universal suffrage and answered to an electorate that was 69 percent Sinhalese’ (ibid, 88). The first culmination of these developments was in ‘the reparation of the national flag [and] the citizenship and electoral laws of 1948/49’ (Bandara 2006, 37–38), both of which deliberately sought to limit minorities—particularly the Tamils—to the margins. The Citizenship Act of 1948, whose requirements most first or second-generation Indian immigrant workers could not meet to claim citizenship, ‘directly contributed to the [Tamils’] alienation, support for secessionism, and the outbreak of ethnic violence and civil war in the 1970s and 1980s’ (Shastri 2007, 65). The notorious 1956 reforms compounded these structural injustices, brought ethnic politics to centre stage, and set off a vicious cycle of ethnic outbidding that pushed the country into a protracted war of nearly three decades.

A look into the history that led to this state of affairs takes us to S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike, whose ambitious designs were not offered a promising future in the Senanayake-dominated United National Party (UNP). He broke away from that party and set up the Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP), forming coalitions with leftist parties and mobilising the public along lines of ethnoreligiosity (Sinhala-Buddhism) to rival the electoral power of the UNP. Bandaranaike’s choice to appeal to Sinhala-Buddhist consciousness was prompted as much by prospects of territorial representation as it was by the social dynamics of the time:

At three levels…post-colonial Sinhala nationalism made a strong impact on the politics of the country. Firstly, it developed a fairly cohesive vision for Sri Lanka’s post-colonial nation-state, a vision constructed through grievances as well as aspirations of the Sinhala Buddhist majority. Secondly, it articulated a set of demands, meant to address the grievances of the Sinhala Buddhist community. These demands appear subsequently to have influenced state policy after 1956…. The third impact concerns the transformation of social bases of state power in post-colonial Sri Lanka…. In class terms, the UNP leadership came from an urban, conservative and anglicized elite… [that was] not in line with the middle class, rural nativism of the emerging nationalist forces. (Uyangoda 2000, 63)

Hence Bandaranaike, himself an Anglican converted to Buddhism for the sake of power, was able—and willing—to mobilise the bulk of the electorate by appealing to their majoritarian ethnoreligious sentiments. This endeavour was mainly carried out by presenting the new SLFP as an alternative political force that was more representative than the elite-based UNP of the grievances and aspirations of the majority of the country, the rural Sinhala-Buddhists who already perceived themselves as being socio-economically under threat by other ethnoreligious groups. The status of Sinhala as the language of the underdog vis-à-vis English, the language of privilege that afforded one access to prestigious professions and social conditions, further contributed to this grievance consciousness. This is because the rural Sinhala masses were mostly educated in their vernacular language, and therefore had little hope of reaching the higher echelons of society, a mentality that was duly exploited by Bandaranaike.

Of special interest here is the fact that the Sinhala lower castes were for the first time experiencing a slackening of the grip of caste discrimination, such that they were now presented with the opportunity of upward mobilisation, a hitherto forbidden fruit. Bandaranaike’s approach, though lethal to inter-ethnic harmony, constituted a laudable measure for those who were oppressed in the Sinhala society because of their caste, especially within the rigid caste stratifications of the Kandyan regions. Group discussions conducted with respondents of the Kandyan lower castes corroborated this reading, whereby Bandaranaike’s politics was considered ‘noble’ for undermining caste divisions. As an unwitting spin-off of Bandaranaike’s decision, intra-Sinhala divisions (both caste- and region-based) paled over time, giving rise to ethnic solidarity that later definitively strengthened in response to the worsening ethnic war with the Tamils in post-colonial Sri Lanka. It is primarily in the context of this overarching nationalist project that Kandy’s emphasis on distinction was gradually relinquished. As mentioned before, Buddhism proved to be instrumental in this unification as the religion of the Sinhalese, despite its initial role in highlighting Kandy’s distinction.