At the close of the sixteenth century, the Estado da India had reached the zenith of its prosperity. The Portuguese had been absorbed into the state system of Asia where their naval power and their usefulness as trading partners had enabled them to establish a seemingly stable position. Then in 1595–96 there appeared in Asian waters an ominous threat to the Portuguese in the shape of Dutch ships: indeed, for the Portuguese the effect of their arrival can only be described as catastrophic. After 1585, when Philip II with increasing rigour banned their trade with Iberian ports, the Dutch were better prepared than the English to undertake a hazardous sea voyage to the Spice Islands by way of the Cape of Good Hope. In financial strength, administrative skills and naval experience they were well ahead of the Portuguese and the English. The formation of the Vereenidge Oost-Indische Campagnie (VOC) in 1602 coordinated the Dutch efforts and gave them the backing of what, for over a century, was the greatest commercial company in the world. It received extensive state support and monopolist privileges, and deliberately set out to challenge the Portuguese position in the East. Despite initial reverses in attacks on Portuguese forts and settlements, the Dutch had ousted the Portuguese from the Spice Islands, besieged Mozambique and Malacca and blockaded Malacca and Goa all within four years of the foundation of the VOC. Thereafter, the VOC steadily expanded its factories and its influence from the Red Sea to Japan. The establishment of the Dutch headquarters at Batavia after 1619 meant that Portuguese vessels could only use the neighbouring straits of Malacca at great risk to themselves. In the wake of the Dutch came the English but the Hollanders had done much of their work for them by breaking the back of Portuguese sea power in the Far East. In the Persian Gulf and off the west coast of India, however, it was the English who bore the brunt of the attack, at any rate in the first quarter of the century.
Ironically, it was in this period, when Portuguese power was on the decline in almost all parts of Asia, that there was a notable extension of their authority and influence in Sri Lanka: in Kotte and Jaffnapatam.
Portuguese control over the Kotte and Jaffna kingdoms, established in the last decade of the sixteenth century, was consolidated over the first third of the seventeenth century. Sri Lanka’s maritime regions and the Zambezi river valley in Africa were the only two regions in which the Portuguese extended their control beyond the range of their coastal forts. The rapid collapse of Sīt•vaka and the facile restoration of Kotte had shown the Portuguese that the military resources available to them on the island were adequate for the expansion of their power there. The strategic value of Sri Lanka was underlined with the arrival of the Dutch in eastern waters, for Dutch vessels bound for the East Indies sailed round the southern coast of the island. Besides, the growth of Mughal power in the Deccan under Akbar in this same period posed a threat to the Portuguese in Goa.
Till 1597, the reality of Portuguese power in Kotte had been camouflaged somewhat. Dharmapala was still, nominally at least, its ruler. But the aged and expendable Dharmapala never took up residence in his old capital, and seldom asserted his rights to his kingdom; much less did he attempt to share its administration with the Portuguese. In 1580, he had bequeathed his kingdom to the Portuguese monarch, and this bequest—confirmed and clarified by subsequent documents—furnished the Portuguese with a sufficient and exclusive claim to the kingdom of Kotte. This legal title they proceeded to proclaim within two days of Dharmapala’s death on 27 May 1597. The proclamation was an occasion for much solemnity and ceremony. Dom Jeronimo de Azevedo, the Portuguese captain-general in Sri Lanka, summoned to Colombo Dharmapala’s principal officers, as well as representatives of the provinces, and delegates chosen by those assembled there took an oath of allegiance to the Crown of Portugal on behalf of the people of Kotte.1
From the beginning, however, there was resistance to Portuguese mastery over Kotte. While Dharmapala was alive, there had been two major revolts, one led by Akaragama Appuhamy in 1594 and the other by Edirille R•la in 1594–96. In the first two decades of Portuguese rule after Dharmapala’s death there were four major revolts—those of K•ngara Ārachchi in 1603, Kuruvita R•la in 1603 and 1616–19, and Nikapitiyē Band•ra in 1616–17.2 There were minor revolts in the Seven Kōralēs in 1616 and in the Matara dis•vony in 1619.
In the last years of the sixteenth century, the main centres of rebellion were the Kelani and Kalu River basins and in particular the Siyanē, Hevagam, Salpiti, Rayigam and Pasdun kōralēs. By 1600, Portuguese mastery over these regions had been consolidated and thereafter it was in the periphery3—the border regions where their authority was not yet secure—that Sinhalese resistance persisted. Nevertheless, once resistance erupted into rebellion in these parts, there was a tendency for the rebels to move into the Kelani Valley to confront Portuguese power there. As the Portuguese tightened their grip over the Kotte kingdom, potential rebels faced heavier odds, but once a rebellion broke out, the insurgents were able to hold out for much longer than in the first decade.
There were two basic driving forces in these resistance movements—the desire to be rid of the foreigner, to which was connected a hostility to the Roman Catholic religion. The second factor had to do with discontent among the people at large arising from the rigours of Portuguese land policy, the lawlessness of officials and the government’s increased demands for services and goods from the people.
Resistance movements against the Portuguese received aid primarily from the Kandyan kingdom. Jaffnapatam aided the rebels once, but that was in 1617, a year of acute crisis when the Portuguese were faced with a major rebellion in the lowlands of the south-west.
The kingdom of Jaffnapatam was the weakest of the three major units into which Sri Lanka was divided in the sixteenth century; it was the poorest and, because it was easily accessible by sea, vulnerable in a way that the Udarata and Sīt•vaka never were. Moreover, with the establishment of Portuguese control over the lowlands of the south-west, Sinhalese lascarin troops were used against the Jaffna Tamil forces, without fear of desertion to the ranks of the enemy.
A Portuguese expeditionary force under Andre Furtado de Mendoça in 1591 had consolidated the Portuguese hold in Jaffna. The new king, Ethirimanna Ciṅkam, owed his throne to the Portuguese and was pledged to favour Christianity. The disturbed political situation in Jaffnapatam during the three preceding decades had seen the power and influence of the Jaffna nobility increase at the expense of the king, while some of these nobles became Christians and looked to the Portuguese for advancement, the bulk of them remained steadfastly Hindu and resented Portuguese interference with their cultural and trade ties with Tanjore. The ruler’s commitment to Christianity alienated the majority of his subjects as well because of their fidelity to the traditional religion.
The weakness of the king’s position became evident within a year of de Mendoça’s expedition when discontent in the Jaffna kingdom compelled Ethirimanna Ciṅkam to abandon his palace and seek refuge in the Portuguese township of Jaffna. After a brief struggle Ethirimanna Ciṅkam re-established his control over the northern kingdom, but he found it politic to move away from his Portuguese mentors and to make an ostentatious demonstration of his independence of them. Partly, this was a shrewd move to win the support of his subjects; but there were other reasons as well. Some of the Portuguese in Jaffna scarcely concealed their contempt for him and openly insulted him when he disagreed with them. He had suffered financial losses on account of variations in the tribute demanded from him by the factor of Mannar—elephants in one year and cash in another without prior warning. Besides, the Portuguese ouvidor or judge of Mannar sought to extend his authority to the Jaffna kingdom as well. Above all, there were the complications caused by the proselytizing zeal of the missionaries.
The Portuguese themselves were dissatisfied with Ethirimanna Ciṅkam—indeed they had begun to have doubts about his loyalty to them as early as 1595—but while relations between the two parties kept deteriorating, neither felt inclined to make a move against the other. In 1614, however, the Portuguese king sent definite instructions to depose Ethirimanna Ciṅkam and only the lack of means for the task prevented the captain-general of Sri Lanka from embarking on this enterprise. As it was, they were spared the necessity because of Ethirimanna Ciṅkam’s death in 1616.
The Portuguese viceroy at Goa soon found himself faced with the complications stemming from a disputed succession to the throne of Jaffna and a seizure of power by a faction led by Caṅkili Kumara, a nephew of Ethirimanna Ciṅkam, who killed all princes of the blood save the legitimate heir—Ethirimanna Ciṅkam’s three-year-old son and Caṅkili’s own brother-in-law. Then Caṅkili as well as a rival sought recognition from the Portuguese as regent of Jaffnapatam. Faced with Nikapitiyē Band•ra’s formidable rebellion, the Portuguese had no aversion to Caṅkili acting as regent on condition that he would not give assistance or refuge to Nikapitiyē Band•ra.
But Caṅkili had little popular support in Jaffnapatam and his position there soon became insecure. In August-September 1618, a revolt was organized by a Christian group and Caṅkili was driven to seek refuge in Kayts whence he applied to the Portuguese for assistance but found them reluctant to support him against their co-religionists. It was at this stage that Caṅkili appealed to the powerful nayak of Tanjore who promptly obliged him with a force of 5,000 men which easily crushed the rebellion. Nevertheless, his position remained as unenviable as it had been previously. In Jaffnapatam, Caṅkili was dependent on troops from Tanjore, many of whom remained behind under their commander to serve in the Jaffna forces; on the other hand, he could not break with the Portuguese. He continued to pay them tribute and allowed freedom of movement to their settlers and priests within the kingdom even while they were urging the authorities in Goa to conquer Jaffna.
It was under Filipe de Oliviera in 1619 that the Portuguese made their move, for reasons which were defensive in intent. They had found that Caṅkili, despite assurances to the contrary, was permitting mercenaries and supplies to move into territory held by anti-Portuguese forces at a time of great danger to their position in Sri Lanka. The Jaffna ruler was making efforts to get the Kandyan king—Senarat—into renewed opposition to the Portuguese and had already sought aid from the Dutch at Paleacat. In March 1619, de Sa, the Portuguese captain-general on the island, received news from Mannar that a cousin of the last Kunjali admiral of Calicut had appeared off Jaffna with five armed vessels—presumably at the request of Caṅkili—and that this fleet was attacking Portuguese ships.
Although the Portuguese expedition was speedily successful and Caṅkili was captured and taken to Colombo as a prisoner, throughout 1620–21 there were pockets of opposition to the Portuguese in Jaffnapatam. The Portuguese had to wage two major campaigns, each more arduous than that by which the kingdom of Jaffnapatam had been conquered in 1619, before they consolidated their position. In both cases, sizeable invading forces from Tanjore were joined by local Tamil recruits in an attempt to oust the Portuguese—who nonetheless held out successfully.
One of the key factors in the success of the Portuguese in Jaffnapatam in 1619–21 was the presence of a pro-Portuguese Christian minority in Jaffna. During and after the conquest this minority provided a source of strength in Jaffna, which may well have tipped the scales in favour of the Portuguese on crucial occasions.
Two points about the conquest of Jaffna are worth noting. First, it provided a useful accession of strength to the Portuguese at a time when their fortunes were on the wane in the East. It strengthened their control over pearl fishery and, by giving them greater influence over the supply of elephants from the Vanni, increased their domination over the island’s elephant trade. Jaffna was the main market for elephants captured in the island. There was the advantage too that Portuguese soldiers could be rewarded with grants of land in Jaffnapatam. But most important of all, at a time when their command of the sea was being challenged, Portuguese communications between the Malabar and Coromandel Coasts were made safer than before once they had control over Jaffna. Second, the subjugation of the Jaffna kingdom was one of the most lasting effects of Portuguese rule. The Dutch and the British after them continued the policy of treating Jaffnapatam as a mere unit of a larger political entity.
For two decades after regaining its independence, the Kandyan kingdom was confronted by a concerted Portuguese attempt to bring it under their rule and thus complete their domination over the whole island. As legatees of the Kotte kings, the Portuguese sought to reassert Kotte’s overlordship over the Udarata. Moreover, through the process of conversion to Roman Catholicism, the Portuguese had pliant protégés whose claims to the Kandyan throne were as good as, if not better than, those of any other aspirant. These claims they now advanced in support of an extension of Portuguese power to the Udarata. Pedro Lopes de Souza led a Portuguese expeditionary force for this purpose in 1594 taking with them the Sinhalese princess, Kusum•sana Devi, or Dōna Catherina as she was called, who had the strongest claims to the Kandyan throne. The aim quite explicitly was to install her there in the Portuguese interest. But they were outwitted by Konappu Band•ra, an erstwhile protégé of theirs (he had fled to them on the execution of his father Weerasundera Band•ra by R•jasimha I) who was to be the legatee—quite unexpectedly—for the Portuguese of the successful guerrilla campaign directed against de Souza’s force. He captured the prized Kusum•sana Devi and married her, thus securing solid claims to the Kandyan throne, even though the Portuguese would not recognize them. Konnappu Band•ra reigned in Kandy as Vimala Dharma Sūriya till 1604.4 The Portuguese would neither grant him recognition in this position nor abandon their claims, as heirs to Kotte, to suzerainty over the Udarata. Indeed, Portuguese anxiety to subjugate Kandy increased with the arrival of the Dutch in Asian waters.
Vimala Dharma Sūriya and his successor Senarat5 (1604–35) between them re-established the kingdom of Kandy. Their aims were modest and starkly limited: survival was all and peace on any terms which the Portuguese were prepared to grant. But the latter (especially when de Azevedo was captain-general) were not interested in peace with the Kandyans and were intent on the systematic destruction of parts of the Kandyan kingdom through regular forays. The Kandyan kingdom retained its independence only because the Portuguese could not muster the manpower (in terms of Portuguese soldiers) necessary to subjugate it. But Kandyan policy towards the Portuguese did not change; it remained one of détente. This they achieved to some extent by the treaty of 1617, under the terms of which the Portuguese at last recognized Senarat as ruler of the Kandyans. The latter in turn acknowledged the authority of the Portuguese to rule over the maritime districts of the Sinhalese. The Kandyans agreed to pay tribute to the Portuguese and promised to deny entry to any of their enemies.
The annexation of Jaffna in 1619 worked to the disadvantage of the Kandyans by depriving them of a potential ally and a bridgehead for communication with other rulers in south India. One result of the annexation was that the only ports which the Portuguese did not control in Sri Lanka were on the east coast, which was acknowledged as being part of the Kandyan kingdom. Despite this, they soon set about gaining control of the two major ports of Batticaloa and Trincomalee; the latter they captured quite easily and in 1628 they seized and fortified Batticaloa. Despite these blatant infringements of Kandyan sovereignty, Senarat would do nothing to precipitate a confrontation with the Portuguese.6
By 1628, however, the signs of a change in the Kandyan policy towards the Portuguese were manifesting themselves. Senarat’s son R•jasimha—the future R•jasimha II—anxious to take on the mantle of Sīt•vaka and of his namesake R•jasimha I, in resolute opposition to the Portuguese—was largely responsible for the change. The Kandyans now resorted to a more aggressive policy and organized incursions deep into Portuguese-held territory. The Portuguese, in turn, reverted to the old policy of attempting an armed invasion for the subjugation of Kandy. In 1630, a Portuguese expedition under Constantine de Sa set out for this purpose, but it was routed at the battle of Randenivela near Vellavaya. Once again, as under the Sīt•vaka kings, the Portuguese were harried and pushed back to the security of their forts. Once again, in imitation of M•y•dunnē and R•jasimha I, the aim was to drive the Portuguese out of Sri Lanka.
The change of policy from détente to vigorous resistance was sustained over the next twenty-eight years. But in the meantime a respite came in 1633—a temporary truce, a peace of exhaustion. A Luso-Kandyan treaty signed in 1633 was, curiously, more favourable to the Portuguese in that their control over the ports of the eastern coast was recognized. It required the threat of the renewal of war to get the Kandyans to accept the treaty as a disagreeable but temporary necessity. And they began to look earnestly for foreign assistance against the Portuguese, the objective being the prevention of reinforcements from abroad for Portuguese forces in forts on the seafront. Time and again, in the past naval power had been the decisive factor in the survival of the Portuguese in Sri Lanka.
Negotiations between R•jasimha II and the Dutch were conducted over a long period, but were successfully concluded in 1638. Each side hoped to use the other for its own ends. For R•jasimha II the sole objective was the expulsion of the Portuguese and he was willing to pay a heavy price for this. For the Dutch the primary interest was in the cinnamon trade which they desired to control, and if possible monopolize. R•jasimha was prepared to assign them a monopoly of the spice trade of the island in return for aid against the Portuguese, as well as reimbursement of the costs of the campaign. This latter provision was nothing more than a trap for the Kandyans, a sordid essay in chicanery which was to poison relations between the two parties in the future.7
The treaty came into effect immediately and almost at once it led to misunderstandings and bickering between the allies. In 1639, Trincomalee and Batticaloa were captured from the Portuguese and handed back to the Kandyans, but when the ports of Galle and Negombo were taken in 1640, the Dutch8 retained them under their control on the grounds that the Kandyan ruler had not paid them the expenses incurred in these expeditions.9 It is not without significance that while the east coast was not a cinnamon-producing area, the ports of Galle and Negombo afforded control over some of the richest cinnamon lands on the island.
Meanwhile, the diplomatic and political affairs of Europe also intruded into the conflict in Sri Lanka. At this time—1640—a native Portuguese dynasty was raised to the throne (by a very popular rebellion) after a period of eighty years during which Portugal was under Habsburg rule. One of the immediate effects of this was to put an end to hostilities between the Dutch and the Portuguese in Europe. However, not till 1645 did this armistice apply to the conflict between them in the eastern seas. For a period of about seven years, there was a lull in which the Portuguese in Sri Lanka were afforded a breathing space. During the same period disagreements between R•jasimha II and the Dutch nearly broke up their alliance and there seemed every prospect of a triangular conflict in Sri Lanka, but when hostilities between the Dutch and the Portuguese were resumed in 1652, R•jasimha returned to support the Dutch in what proved to be the final phase in the expulsion of the Portuguese. In May 1656, their fort of Colombo surrendered after a long and heroic resistance. It took the Dutch two more years to eliminate the Portuguese presence from the island; their capture of Jaffna, the last Portuguese stronghold in the island, in 1658 gave the coup de grâce.
After the surrender of Jaffna in June 1658, the Dutch fleet crossed over to the south Indian mainland to attack the Portuguese strongholds there. The capture of Tuticorin and Nagapattinam gave them control over the narrow straits between Sri Lanka and the Indian mainland, ensuring at the same time greater security for their forces in Sri Lanka. The Dutch conquest of the Portuguese provinces in Malabar was completed by 1663, and with that Portuguese rule in southern India came to an end.
The success of the Dutch over the Portuguese was a reflection of the substantially superior resources available to them.10 Their economic strength was so much greater than that of the Portuguese since the Hollanders and Zeelanders had established a mastery amounting to a near-monopoly over the carrying trade of Europe and commanded between them the largest mercantile fleet in the world at that time. Besides, although the populations of the two countries were about the same, the Dutch could draw on Germany and Scandinavia for as much additional manpower as they needed, while the Portuguese, who had no such external resources at their disposal, found themselves dragged into wars in Flanders, Italy and Catalonia in the wake of the Habsburgs.11 Native-born Portuguese liable to military service in the Estado da India never amounted to more than 6,000 to 7,000 at any one time. The conquest of the Kandyan kingdom, for instance, was attempted with less than 1,000 Portuguese troops. De Azevedo’s army, for instance, had only 800 Portuguese troops and 300 topases.12 Indeed, it is difficult to see how the Portuguese, with a population of a little over one million, could have successfully vied for colonial supremacy against the Netherlands, France and England, all of which had far greater resources. Besides, Portuguese reliance on ‘gentlemen of blood and coat armour’ as military or naval leaders placed them at a disadvantage with officers in the service of the VOC, where great merit and not birth was the criterion for promotion.
Dutch resources in the way of shipping, munitions and equipment, far superior to those of the Portuguese, were directed with greater effect and purpose. The Portuguese made a desperate bid to defend their far-flung possessions without having adequate naval forces to maintain communications between them, and by grasping at too much they lost all, or nearly all, when they might have done better to have concentrated their forces on a few places. Nevertheless, when we consider the fact that the Portuguese were also engaged in fighting a bitter (and ultimately, largely successful) war against the Dutch West India Company in Brazil and West Africa from 1624 until 1654, it is in many ways remarkable that they were able to hold out in Asia for as long as they did.
Considerations of prestige militated against any policy of cutting their losses. The Portuguese confronted desperate expedients and agonizing choices as they sought to defend the whole sprawling territorial and commercial structure of the Estado. And when, at last, a choice had to be made, it was Brazil that was preferred to the possessions in Sri Lanka and Malabar. As for Sri Lanka, it was of vital significance that the shift of Portuguese interest from India and the Indian Ocean to Brazil and the Atlantic took place in the mid-seventeenth century and not merely after the discovery of Brazilian gold in 1690. The councillors of Joao IV accorded a clear priority to the saving of Brazil over saving the Estado da India, a choice equivalent to that of letting the Dutch overrun Sri Lanka and their possessions on the Malabar Coast. Moreover, the local interests of those Portuguese who identified themselves with Goa rather than Lisbon were antithetical to the metropolitan interests of the Crown of Portugal. These Goan interests severely impaired the Portuguese effort to save Ceylon after the renewal of war with the Dutch in 1652. Within sixty years the Estado was destroyed as an imperial structure and was reduced to some East African footholds, Goa and the western Indian settlements, Timor and Macao.13
Portuguese rule in Sri Lanka was limited in area and duration. Area-wise it was limited to the old Kotte kingdom and to the Jaffna kingdom. The Portuguese ruled for nearly sixty years in Kotte and just under forty years in Jaffna. Even in these regions, but more especially along the border with the Udarata, their control was not unchallenged by indigenous forces. But despite these limitations their governance of the maritime region was significant for the wide range of changes they initiated, and all in all their imprint on Sri Lanka was more marked than that of the Dutch who had a far longer period of control. We have very little information on the Portuguese in the Jaffna kingdom. Jaffnapatam was a comparatively small area of peripheral importance to the Sri Lankan polity of this period—our main interest. The focus of attention, in this chapter will thus be on Portuguese rule in Kotte, the Sinhalese areas of the littoral.
Under the Portuguese there was little or no interference with the existing administrative structure of the territories they controlled; they used the native administrative hierarchy for their own purposes and left it much as they found it. Even the high-ranking mudaliy•rs were seldom displaced provided that they made the necessary change in religious affiliation. Again, the Portuguese preferred to use revenue farmers to collect taxes rather than relying entirely on officials. The renters were required to pay fixed sums of money to the government for the right to collect the taxes. The Portuguese did make an attempt to encourage fidalgos to settle in the island as landlord tax-collectors, but not many were attracted there for this purpose. At the same time, officials, whether Sinhalese or Portuguese, were given land grants called accomodessans in the traditional Sinhalese manner, instead of salaries. There was also one notable contribution of the Portuguese in the sphere of administration, the compilation of thōmbos14 or registers of agricultural holdings. The revenues due to the state were set out in detail in the thōmbos. The Portuguese countenanced, continued and sustained the caste system, using it for their own purposes, where necessary with subtle and significant modifications in its working such as for instance in regard to the cinnamon-peelers.
The first twenty years of Portuguese rule saw the introduction of several important modifications in the traditional land tenure system, the most significant being the trend towards the substitution of quit rents for service tenure at the village holders’ level.15 This again was not so much an innovation as the extension to the people at large of what had been a privilege of the thin upper crust of the social structure whose nindagam holdings were subject to such a payment.
A second departure from tradition—the entry of Portuguese settlers to the ranks of village landholders, and the gradual alienation of royal villages (gabad•gam) to Roman Catholic missionaries and Portuguese settlers—had more far-reaching consequences, not only for the traditional society but also for the Portuguese themselves. The evidence suggests that these changes in landholding did not, as a rule, result in any displacement of cultivators, which, however, seems to have been due to the chronic shortage of agricultural labour in early seventeenth-century Kotte rather than to any solicitude for the indigenous peasantry.16 On the other hand, when a gabad•gam was granted to an individual,17 he became entitled to all payments and services from it and the treasury was left with only the quit rent, which was fixed at 12 per cent of the assessed income of the landholder. The state thus sustained a heavy loss of revenue from each so alienated, a loss which kept increasing with the number of gabad•gams transferred to the Portuguese; the tendency to make such transfers was as marked in Kotte as it was in Jaffna. The implications in terms of loss of revenue of such transfers could be gauged from the fact that Portuguese-held villages constituted one-fifth of the land area of Kotte. Viharagam and dēv•lēgam, when transferred to Roman Catholic missionaries, made no payment to the state in cash or service.18
The first phase of Portuguese rule saw a steady decline in the number of villages reserved for the state and a corresponding contraction in the revenue from this source. As a result, the Portuguese administration on the island was in great financial difficulty in the first two decades of the seventeenth century and was forced to adopt unpopular and oppressive measures such as the compulsory purchase of areca. Had the gabad•gam been left in the hands of the state, the Portuguese would have had fewer financial worries.19
By the 1630s, moreover, the Portuguese administration faced an equally disturbing circumstance—village-holders were beginning to buy and sell villages. Under the Kotte kings the sale of villages was prohibited by royal decree, and this restriction had been adhered to, right up to the early 1620s. So long as the unit bought and sold was the village the peasant or panguk•raya was not seriously affected. By the 1620s, however, the sale of individual holdings or pangus within the village became a regular feature. Though this right to sell individual holdings had existed in Sri Lanka since very early times, there had been few such sales during the disturbed times of the sixteenth century. With the return of peace such land transactions had increased and by the 1630s there was, as a result, a small but growing class of landless peasants. The Portuguese sought to check these sales of pangus for a more practical and selfish reason: they found that even those who held land on service tenure and especially categories of service which the state regarded as essential to its interests (cinnamon-peelers, elephant-hunters, woodcutters and carters), were selling their lands. In 1634, it was decreed that all lands bought from these categories of service-holders were to be restored to their previous owners and by the mid-seventeenth century the Sal•gamas were forbidden to sell their land.20
During the years 1621–28, the Portuguese administration in Sri Lanka (in both Kotte and Jaffna) was at last able to meet all expenses from the revenue received from local sources and ceased to be a financial burden on the Estado da India. The war with Kandy did lead to a deficit once again over the next six years, but with the restoration of peace in 1633–34, their financial position improved to the point where local resources, in fact, provided a surplus over and above the costs of administration, and this began to be used for Portuguese ventures elsewhere in Asia.21 The solvency of the Portuguese regime in Sri Lanka, after a long period of budgetary deficits, was, in fact, a reflection of a fundamental change in the economy of the Sinhalese areas of the littoral, the increasing importance of cinnamon as a source of state revenues, and from the 1630s an unprecedented improvement in the prices this commodity fetched in international trade. With the Portuguese hegemony began an era in which the sale of a commercial product, cinnamon, rather than dues from land became the chief source of revenue for the state.22
Cinnamon thrived in the forests of the Kelani Valley and on the coastal stretches of the Kotte kingdom from Chilaw to the Valave River. When the Portuguese obtained de facto control of the cinnamon lands of Kotte in the early 1590s they also inherited the system of open trade in this commodity that had prevailed previously.23 There were no restrictions on the production of cinnamon. The export of the spice—except the quantity specifically delivered to the state—was in the hands of private individuals who had obtained licences for the purpose.
Almost from the beginning, Portuguese officials urged that a closer control of the cinnamon trade was desirable from both an economic and a political point of view. For example, there was the need to prevent the loss of revenue incurred by the sale of cinnamon through ports outside Portuguese control. Several measures designed to promote greater control over the cinnamon trade were promulgated in the 1590s; Colombo was declared the only port through which cinnamon could be legally exported and in 1595 its export was made a private monopoly of the captain of Colombo who was required to sell a fixed proportion of his stocks at cost to the state. But while these measures ensured more efficient control over the trade, they failed to check the fall in prices of the commodity. This latter trend continued into the first decade of the seventeenth century. In the hope of reversing this, the Portuguese resorted to various means of restricting the supply of cinnamon and when these proved unsatisfactory it was decided in 1614 that the trade in cinnamon would be a royal monopoly. It was the Portuguese who first established a state monopoly of overseas trade in cinnamon. Not that this immediately had the desired effect; throughout the period 1615–28 the main objective—that of raising prices—was not achieved. But from 1629, prices began to rise and this lasted over the next decade.
For the production of cinnamon the Portuguese used the traditional Sinhalese machinery—the caste system—but characteristically with innovations which stopped well short of its transformation in basic structure, habitual character or disposition. There was, in fact, a purposeful restriction of change to meet the peculiar requirements of the Portuguese. The demands of the state on the Sal•gamas grew inexorably—arguably a modification rather than the metamorphosis which the recruitment in increasing numbers of non-Sal•gama Sinhalese for cinnamon peeling in the first half of the seventeenth century would seem to signify. By 1650 these included people of the Kar•va, Hunu and Padu castes. The change of occupation did not either improve or detract from their status vis-à-vis the Sal•gamas. Worse, still, once this obligation was foisted on a group, there was little or no hope of its being released from it. At the same time, a fundamental change in the basis of the services due from the peelers was introduced. Where earlier these were based on the extent and quality of the land held by them, by the end of the period of Portuguese rule they were associated with the person rather than the land. By the middle of the seventeenth century it had become the standard practice to impose on every Sal•gama aged more than twelve years the obligation to supply a fixed quantity of cinnamon, and the nature and extent of a landholding had little or nothing to do with the labour extracted by the state from him.
Areca nut, an article of commercial value long before Portuguese rule began, was a mainstay of local trade in the Kotte kingdom and peasants had grown accustomed to bartering it for their cloth and salt. When the Portuguese gained control over Kotte, the state’s entitlement to areca was confined to the produce paid as dues in kind by those who lived in the gabad•gam, the levy known as the kotik•badda. Under the Portuguese, every village in which the areca palm grew, and not merely the gabad•gam, was obliged to contribute a share of the produce from this source to the government; payment for it was at a fixed rate, generally well below the market price. The Sinhalese were bitterly opposed to this unprecedented compulsory purchase of areca and regularly urged on the government the need to abolish the system. But these protests were futile. Not merely that, but the fixed price at which purchases were made was rigidly adhered to regardless of market conditions and invariably to the detriment of the peasants. The areca collected by the government very probably found its way to south India to pay for the purchase of rice which was imported from there. Sri Lanka and south India still formed a trading unit and the trade with south India was indeed vital to the economy of the littoral under Portuguese control for south India supplied rice and cloth and bought areca in exchange.
The coming of the Portuguese to Sri Lanka thus certainly led to greater commercial activity, increasing monetization of the economy and higher prices for its products. Because commodity prices were artificially but rigorously restrained after 1597, the producers’ share of the sale value of these remained static while the benefits of higher prices were retained by the state, or Portuguese officials, civil and military, and Portuguese residents engaged in trade.
Perhaps the most notable legacy of the Portuguese on the island was the introduction of Roman Catholicism. In their zeal for proselytization, they ruthlessly destroyed Buddhist and Hindu temples and handed viharagam and dēv•lēgam over to the Roman Catholic orders. The policy of preventing the worship of religions other than Roman Catholicism had begun in the days of Dharmapala. At the same time, various inducements were held out to potential converts to Roman Catholicism by way of reward, honour and advantage. Thus converts were assured of preferential treatment under the law, as well as exemption from certain taxes. In brief, these converts came to be regarded and treated as a privileged group. As the religion of the establishment, Roman Catholicism would have had a potent appeal to those at the apex of the Sinhalese caste hierarchy (and probably their counterparts among the Tamils as well) who aspired to high office, or at least to the retention of their traditional position under the new dispensation. For them, adherence to the established church was a necessary qualification. For the humble and lowly, Roman Catholicism was a means of gaining the standing denied them under the traditional religions.
The bonds of the traditional society, already strained by the movement of refugees from the south-west coast to the highland regions, were further weakened by the fanaticism and bigotry of the Portuguese which deprived the people living in the regions under their control of their religious mentors. Perhaps the Tamils of the north suffered more than the Sinhalese, since the bhikkhus found a convenient and congenial refuge in the Kandyan kingdom. Bigotry, even fanaticism, had not been unknown in Sri Lanka’s past—nor for that matter had persecution on grounds of religious beliefs. But instances of this had in general been rare, and in the case of Buddhism, not since the distant past. By the sixteenth century, tolerance of other faiths was a well-established Buddhist tradition. In Sri Lanka, the Portuguese record of religious persecution, coercion and mindless destruction of places of worship sacred to other faiths was unsurpassed in its scale and virulence.24 The establishment of Roman Catholicism was achieved at the cost of tremendous suffering and humiliation imposed on the adherents of the traditional religions and on Islam.
Yet, the impact of Roman Catholicism was not entirely destructive. It is to the credit of the Portuguese that conversions to Roman Catholicism stood the test of harassment and persecution under the Dutch and the indifference of the British. In sharp contrast, Calvinism, which the Dutch propagated with much the same zeal if not quite the same means as the Portuguese did Roman Catholicism, developed no strong roots among the people, and its influence evaporated with the collapse of Dutch power. Moreover, the conversion to Roman Catholicism of a large proportion of the people in the areas under Portuguese control opened the way for the absorption of new social concepts such as monogamy and the sanctity of marriage, and certainly the disappearance of polygamy and polyandry from the lowlands owes much to the influence of the new religion.
Their period of rule was too short for the Portuguese to have left any real mark on the island’s architecture and sculpture. Their forts and churches were either demolished or renovated by the Dutch. But the Portuguese as the first builders in Sri Lanka of dwelling houses of any substantial or permanent kind contributed most of the words associated with the building craft to the Sinhalese language. The rounded Sinhalese roofing tile of the coastal areas bears a strong resemblance to that of southern Europe. The possibility that this was introduced to the island by the Portuguese is strengthened by the fact that the traditional roofing tile of the Kandyan areas is flat rather than rounded.
A Portuguese dialect was spoken in Sri Lanka till well into the twentieth century. Portuguese was indeed the lingua franca of maritime Asia and many of its words have been absorbed into the Sinhalese and Tamil languages. Portuguese influence on female dress survived in the lowlands, especially among the Sinhalese, till the nineteenth century. Indeed they left a greater cultural imprint on the people of the lowlands than the Dutch who ruled for a much longer time. All this is striking testimony to the remarkable foresight of Joao de Barros who predicted in 1540:
The Portuguese arms and pillars placed in Africa and in Asia, and in countless isles beyond the bounds of these continents, are material things, and time may destroy them. But time will not destroy the religion, customs and language which the Portuguese have implanted in those lands.25