British experience in North America in the last quarter of the eighteenth century served to underline the increasing disenchantment with representative institutions in colonial government and set in motion a trend towards concentration of power in the hands of colonial governors. Since the British possessions in Sri Lanka were regarded mainly as a strategic outpost, this pattern was evident there as well. Indeed, the pattern of colonial administration which the British had inherited from the Dutch in combination with r•jak•riya, which placed at the governor’s disposal a massive pool of labour, strengthened the governor’s powers beyond the limits set by Whitehall.
In the advisory council established in 1802 was the germ of a legislative authority. But this council was clearly subordinate to the governor, just as the colonial government was subordinated to the imperial government. A more effective check on the governor’s autocracy lay in the Supreme Court of Judicature and the new High Court of Appeal set up by the Judicial Charter of 1801. The charter establishing the Supreme Court prescribed its jurisdiction and laid down rules governing its exercise; these were a close approximation to English law and legal practice, more liberal and humane in temper than those established by the VOC. At the end of North’s tenure of office there was an elaborate if somewhat expensive system of courts; the use of the English language in the courts was well established and the process of anglicization of the system of judicial administration had been set in motion. More significant, however, was the emergence of a conflict between the judiciary and the military, the forerunner of a prolonged and bitter confrontation between the executive and the judiciary under North’s successor, Maitland.
Faced with a challenge to his authority by Chief Justice Lushington, Maitland sought to bolster his own position by instituting a reform of the judicial structure. Ironically, the Charter of Justice of 1810 strengthened the position of the chief justice vis-à-vis the governor and the instructions accompanying the charter enhanced it still further. And Sir Alexander Johnston (newly knighted), the guiding influence behind the new charter, returned to the island as chief justice. (There was one other notable feature of the reforms of 1810: the introduction of trial by jury in the criminal sessions of the Supreme Court, which also owed much to Johnston’s persuasive advocacy.) Maitland regarded the relegation of the governor to a position which in some ways was inferior to that of the chief justice as an unacceptable development and although he was due to leave the island soon and thus had no personal interest at stake, he nevertheless took it upon himself to make his objections to the scheme known in Whitehall. He did this with a vigour and cogency which yielded fruit in an almost immediate reappraisal of the situation. A new charter issued on 30 October 1811 was much more favourable to the executive and restored much of the governor’s power and influence in the administration of justice. But the conflict between the Supreme Court and the governor continued unabated till the introduction of the Charter of Justice of 1833, which established a more satisfactory relationship between the executive and the judiciary.
Those conflicts emerged from conditions inherent in the constitutional structure of the colony, which gave the executive a degree of power and influence over the minor judiciary and the lower courts which the judges of the Supreme Court, as the only members of the judiciary who were really independent of the governor, viewed with displeasure. Nor was this resentment at what was regarded as unwarranted interference by the executive in the administration of justice confined to the judges of the Supreme Court. In the Kandyan provinces the governor established an even greater control over the judicial authorities. The normal restraints on executive authority and interference with the judiciary which existed in the littoral did not operate in the Kandyan areas since the Supreme Court was denied any jurisdiction there. Every attempt by the Supreme Court to extend its jurisdiction to the Kandyan provinces was successfully repelled by the governor. The governors, for their part, were just as resentful of the independence of the judges of the Supreme Court and showed scant respect for their rights. All other officials in the country were very much under the governor’s control.
One of the most conspicuous features of British administrative policy in this period was the Europeanization of the higher bureaucracy. In this they departed from the Dutch and Portuguese practice where much greater use had been made of the traditional indigenous machinery of administration. The new policy inevitably made for steeply rising administrative costs; the structure regularly expanded despite sporadic attempts at retrenchment. The revenue did not keep pace with the increasing costs of administration and coupled with the clear failure to devise a new financial base for the colony, this was the fundamental reason for the recurrent deficits in the government’s financial account. Recruitment to the covenanted civil service established in 1802 was on the basis of patronage under the control of the Secretary of State for the Colonies, while the regulation and control of the service was very much the purview of the governors—a division of responsibility which did not always operate smoothly. Since patronage was the sole determinant and educational qualifications were not insisted upon, the result was that the ‘writers’—as these recruits were called—were young and immature. The exercise of the secretary’s patronage had the effect of making the covenanted service an almost exclusively European one. In making these appointments, the secretaries of state were rarely guided by the needs of the colony, as regards either the number of apprentices or their suitability.
After a period of apprenticeship under a collector in the provinces, or at a government department in Colombo, these recruits were appointed to their substantive posts. It was at this point that the elite status of the covenanted service really emerged. A number of posts in the establishment were reserved exclusively for them and their basic emoluments were fixed and maintained at a very high level without regard to the financial state of the colony. The salary structure of the Ceylon Civil Service was the highest in the empire outside India and there was the additional inducement of liberal pensions obtainable after a relatively brief period of service. Despite these advantages and attractions, the civil service could hardly be described as an efficient body. When Maitland sought in 1808, for the first time, to introduce the principle of merit in civil service promotion, he met with strong resistance from a powerful lobby of civil servants who were quite happy with the existing system of promotion by seniority.
The Ceylon Civil Service was, from the outset, prohibited from engaging in private trade. This restraint was reaffirmed by Maitland and Brownrigg, but it would appear that there was some laxity in its enforcement; besides, it did not extend to agricultural pursuits, which were separated from trade by a very thin line indeed. It was also stipulated that cadets should acquire a competent knowledge of the local languages—Sinhala and Tamil. This was seldom observed in the spirit of the original regulation. The higher bureaucracy, with their exclusive and privileged status in the official hierarchy, were an administrative elite and a virtual ruling caste in the colony. It was the heyday of the belief that a civil servant should be a jack of all trades and master of all. It was also the heyday of the view that the technical expert should be subordinate to the administrator. Although the covenanted civil servants tended to think of their service as synonymous with administration, there were other categories of officials who were equally vital for the working of the administrative machinery. A considerable body of Europeans of various but supposedly inferior skills and quality manned the lower echelons of the official hierarchy. The clerical service which assisted the civil servants was composed largely of Burghers—the descendants of the Dutch—who elected to remain on the island after the British conquest: clerical service became a tradition with them.
More important, despite the hostility of the British towards them, it was clear that the native headmen were an indispensable link between the rulers and the people. Thus they continued to perform functions which had traditionally fallen within their purview; but the government’s policy was one of curbing their powers, reducing their privileges and bringing their activities under the supervision of British officials. Their duties were closely defined, they were paid a fixed salary instead of being granted accomodessans as had been the former practice and some of the powers they had enjoyed in the past, especially their judicial powers, were transferred to British officials. None of these measures really succeeded in meeting the twin aims of the government, namely, eroding the headmen’s influence among the people and integrating them within the administrative structure as a set of cogs in an increasingly complex machine. Their authority rested on their influence and respect in local society rather than on their legal or political position, and this influence and respect remained more or less stable.
North left much less of a mark on the civil service and the administration than did his successor Maitland. The reorganization of the administration and the reforms initiated by Maitland were some of the most constructive achievements of this period. They survived unchanged till 1832 (and well beyond that date in some respects) but the high standards of administrative efficiency which he set fell considerably after his departure from the island. Perhaps his outstanding contribution lay in his definition of the scope of the powers and functions of the official hierarchy in the provincial structure. It was in the collector that British rule was manifested at the local level. Originally appointed with the management of revenue in mind, he and his assistants soon grew in power and prestige because they were often the only British officials in the provinces. And in the collector of the province came to be concentrated the major administrative, financial and revenue powers of the provincial administration. The collector exercised supervision over all officials in his district, including those attached to departments with specialized duties. The military was beyond his control and the emphasis on security often—and certainly at the beginning of this period—elevated the commandants of the local garrisons into a special position, with the result that there were numerous clashes between the civil and military authorities in some districts over their respective spheres of authority. Maitland, the soldier-administrator, devised a solution to this problem by defining the spheres of authority of the two services.
Because of a deliberate policy of combining executive and judicial authority in the hands of the collectors, the conflicts between the executive and the judiciary which existed at the centre were largely absent at the provincial level. The collectors were responsible for policing their districts through various grades of headmen; they acted as fiscals and justices of the peace, and from North’s time they were entrusted with powers of magistracy which conferred on them a limited jurisdiction in minor criminal offences. It was also a common practice for the collectors to hold the chief judicial office in the province. This combination of executive and judicial authority was repeatedly criticized by the judges of the Supreme Court, firm believers in the theory of the separation of powers, but the government persisted with this policy, pointing out, first, the overriding consideration of security, second, that the primary duty of revenue collection was hampered by the absence of judicial authority in the collector and finally, that only the civil servants could acquire a sufficient understanding of the people’s habits and customs to enable them to deal knowledgeably with their litigation. The collector was the agent of the executive in the provinces, but despite every effort to establish regulatory and supervisory devices, the inadequacy of communications made these ineffective, and the greater the distance from Colombo the more independent the collectors were. There was clear evidence too, in the first half of the nineteenth century, that the administrative structure was more efficient in the provinces than the central establishment at Colombo.
Throughout this period the chief secretaryship—the principal office in the official hierarchy—was held by the incompetent John Rodney during whose long tenure of office (1806–33) this crucial post fell in importance and did not function with the efficiency demanded of it as the nerve centre of the colonial administration. That it did not fare worse and that it provided some measure of coordination at the top was due entirely to the efforts of those who held the post of deputy secretary. Rodney’s successor, Philip Anstruther, who held the post from 1833 to 1845, was in every way a contrast to him. He revitalized the office and demonstrated its effectiveness as a coordinating centre in the hands of a dynamic personality. The governor was treasurer ex officio, but the duties of that office were handled by others. All government auditing and accounting were in the hands of the auditor general and the accountant general, the latter office being often combined with the former or with that of the vice-treasurer.
From the beginning there was an attempt to differentiate revenue collection and disbursement from purely administrative work at the centre: this led to the growth of administrative departments with specialized functions. Here again one notes the energy and initiative of Maitland. North had assigned the collection of the inland revenue to a board of senior officials. This was no more than a supervisory body, the revenue collection proper being undertaken by the collectors. Maitland, who believed in centralized financial control, found this board ineffective for the purpose and replaced it with a commissioner of revenue with wide powers, to whom was also assigned the duty of control and supervision over the collectors and subordinate officials in their revenue duties. Initially, the customs revenue was collected by customs masters stationed at Colombo, Galle and Jaffna, but with Maitland’s reorganization, the duties of these officials were transferred to collectors. The deep involvement of the government in the colonial economy necessitated the creation of a number of separate establishments to conduct specific economic activities. Chief among these was the Cinnamon Department, closely modelled on the mahabadda of old. Like the Portuguese and the Dutch, the British too found that they could not devise a better system for the collection of cinnamon than the traditional mechanism. Other establishments concerned with economic activities did not develop into fully-fledged departments, although they generally functioned as separate bodies.
Several new departments were created in this period. Most notable of these was the registrar general’s department, established by North for the registration of lands after the introduction of his tenurial reforms. Maitland, however, preferred to revert to the Dutch practice of assigning this task to schoolmasters, who were also responsible for the registration of births, baptisms, marriages and deaths. Another office created by North, that of the surveyor general, was retained but Maitland combined it with the post of civil engineer, the official who superintended public works. Neither this new department nor that of the land registrar developed into key branches of the administrative machinery in this period. So long as the economic environment discouraged free enterprise and r•jak•riya was used for the construction and maintenance of public works, this picture could hardly change.
The most complex administrative problem that confronted the British was the absorption of the old Kandyan kingdom into the Crown Colony of Ceylon. Under the terms of the Kandyan Convention, the British consented to the continuation of the traditional administrative system, without much change, ‘according to the laws, institutions and customs established and in force amongst them’. Nevertheless, the traditional system was not unreservedly guaranteed and the British retained the right and power to introduce changes as and when they deemed fit. Carefully embodied in the convention was a declaration of the inherent right of government to redress grievances and reform abuses in all instances whatever, whether particular or general, where such interposition shall become necessary. This latter clause of the convention became in effect ‘the source of British jurisdiction’ in the Kandyan provinces and the means of superseding Kandyan law and judicial institutions in many respects. While the customary law of the Sinhalese had disappeared in the maritime regions, a version of it existed in the Kandyan provinces as part of a living tradition and the British themselves recognized it and continued to apply it there. But a process of superseding Kandyan law began very early and was well established by 1830. Where the Kandyan law was silent or not clear, principles of English law considered relevant in the circumstances were applied. By 1830, the legal principles and formalities prevailing in the Sinhalese areas of the littoral came to be applied in the Kandyan provinces in the field of criminal law and procedure, civil procedure and the law of evidence. The Kandyan law survived chiefly in regard to inheritance, caste, marriage, land tenure and personal service for land.
At the time of the cession of the Kandyan kingdom to the British, the traditional machinery of justice had come to a virtual standstill. There was no noticeable improvement under D’Oyly in the first year of British rule. The Board of Commissioners of Kandyan Affairs was established on 23 August 1816 and among its functions was the administration of justice. While the principal and subordinate chiefs continued to exercise judicial functions, the Board of Commissioners as a body was constituted as another court of law. The collective board with the chiefs associated in its deliberations replaced the mahanaduva of old. More substantial changes were effected after the suppression of the rebellion of 1817–18. Under the belief that English legal procedure was superior to the Kandyan procedures, British officials were entrusted with an increasing personal control and authority over the judicature in the Kandyan provinces. The new machinery was still a compromise between the indigenous and the foreign and it became increasingly evident that it was an unsatisfactory compromise with some of the worst features of both systems. Unfamiliar formalities and technicalities were enforced in an alien language, while traditional institutions—such as the gamsabh•vas—and traditional laws and customs were devalued.
The administrative machinery devised for the control of the Kandyan provinces had the twofold effect of buttressing the governor’s autocracy and of bringing it at the same time into sharper focus. Within this region there were no restraints on the governor’s autocratic powers: there was no advisory council and the jurisdiction of the Supreme Court did not extend there. Instead, the whole judicial machinery was under his control and for the Kandyan provinces he was in effect the court of final appeal. He exercised his executive power through his personal representative, the Resident and the Board of Commissioners. Within this structure the Resident had responsibility for political affairs, the second commissioner was invested with authority in judicial matters, while the third was placed in charge of revenue collection and allied matters. With the suppression of the great rebellion of 1817–18, the judicial and revenue commissioners were now explicitly vested with the powers and responsibilities of the high-ranking chiefs of the old order. The changes brought into effect after the rebellion and with the proclamation of 21 November 1818 did not alter the constitutional position of the governor, who continued to wield supreme legislative, executive and judicial powers. If there was some semblance of a separation of executive and judicial authority in the littoral, this was wholly absent in the interior. In the Kandyan provinces military and executive authority was combined in the same official and the security factor was emphasized with the appointment of the officer commanding the forces in the interior to the board in 1819 and his elevation to the presidency with the death of the Resident, Sir John D’Oyly, in 1824. Like the frontier regions of India, the Kandyan region drew the best administrative talent that was made available in Ceylon.
The two fundamental issues in the administration of the Kandyan provinces were: first, the position of the chiefs and, second, the question of security. With the suppression of the rebellion of 1817–18 the British were able to devise means of reducing the power and status of the chiefs by requiring them to function completely subordinate to and under the direct supervision of British officials. It was Brownrigg’s hope to reduce the chiefs to the status of stipendiaries charged with carrying into effect the regulations and orders of the government and to establish British officials as ‘the real organs of power’. Agents of government with wide exclusive and judicial authority were appointed in every outlying district, while those close to Kandy were brought under the control of the Board of Commissioners. But this loss of their former power and privileges did not result in any appreciable decline in the influence of the chiefs over the people so long as they were and continued to be ‘the only medium of communication between the government and the people’. Second, the national consciousness of the Kandyans was the most formidable problem that confronted the British in Ceylon in the three decades following the cession of the Kandyan kingdom. In the 1820s, Barnes’s network of roads, built with the help of the traditional r•jak•riya system, placed the military control of the Kandyan provinces firmly in British hands. The secret of Kandy’s long and successful survival in the face of over two centuries of western attempts at subjugation lay in the fact that most of the country was a wilderness suited to guerrilla warfare of which the Kandyans were masters. Now guerrilla tactics could no longer cut communications between garrisons or hold up troop movements. It is a measure of the success of Barnes’s policies that in 1831 a significant step in the establishment of a uniform administrative structure for the island was taken. With the appointment of Sir Robert Wilmot Horton as governor in 1831, the governor’s constitutional position changed somewhat. The advisory council was formally established and its powers were extended to the Kandyan provinces; this foreshadowed more far-reaching changes that came two years later with the Colebrooke-Cameron reforms.
Perhaps the most valuable contribution of Colebrooke and Cameron to the island’s future political development was to give it a more liberal form of government than that which had prevailed before 1833. This latter bore the stamp of Dundas’s concern for a strong executive. Colebrooke sought to reverse this trend. In place of the advisory council, he proposed the creation of two councils—the executive and the legislative councils—to assist the governor. The Legislative Council was to serve a limited purpose. The Colonial Office, like Colebrooke, did not regard it as a representative assembly in embryo, but looked upon it as a check upon the governor in the sense that it was an independent and fairly reliable source of information for the Secretary of State who would otherwise be dependent on the governor alone for information with regard to the colony and its affairs.2 In brief, it was introduced to make Whitehall’s control over the colonial administration more effective. This concept of the role of the Legislative Council was too restrictive. For the really remarkable feature of the Legislative Council established in 1833 was not so much the existence of an official majority within it as the presence of unofficials. And the presence of unofficials served to underscore the validity of the comment that the ‘...essential purpose of establishing a legislative body has always been to give representation to the inhabitants of the dependency...’. Implicit in this was the assumption that the principle of representation necessarily involved acceptance also of the concept of the Legislative Council as a representative legislature in embryo. From the start, the unofficial members of the Legislative Council—and some of the local newspapers of the day—tended to look upon the Legislative Council as the local parliament.
The chief significance of Colebrooke’s recommendations was not merely that they reversed the trend towards concentration of authority in the governor, but that as a measure of constitutional reform they were far ahead of anything prevalent at that time in India or the non-white colonies. The British colony of Ceylon was very much ‘the constitutional pioneer’ of the non-European dependencies of the British empire over the period from 1833 until about 1870. Hence this was perhaps Colebrooke’s most notable recommendation and the one by which he deserves to be remembered. Cameron’s contribution to this process of liberalization lay in the Charter of Justice of 1833, based on his report on the judiciary. James Stephen, the permanent undersecretary at the Colonial Office, described this charter as ‘...a pure invention...based on speculation (chiefly those of Bentham)’. Cameron was, in fact, a dogmatic Utilitarian unlike Colebrooke. One of the flaws of the judicial system established in 1833 was that it was not rooted in the country’s legal traditions. It did not give the people what they needed most, a system that would ‘investigate disputes and administer justice...in a plain and summary manner’. Nevertheless, it was the foundation of the island’s modern judicial system and the most lasting contribution of the Utilitarians to Sri Lanka.
Colebrooke’s approach to the Kandyan problem resembles in some ways that of Durham to the comparable problem of French Canada. In 1833, his proposals were accepted and the separate administrative system for the Kandyan provinces was abolished and amalgamated with the territories on the littoral acquired from the VOC, in a single unified administrative structure for the whole island. The existing provincial boundaries within the two administrative divisions—the Kandyan and maritime provinces—were redrawn and a new set of five provincial units, of which only the Central Province was Kandyan pure and simple, was established. The new provincial boundaries cut across the traditional divisions and placed many Kandyan regions under the administrative control of the old maritime provinces. An administrative (including judicial) and legislative unification was imposed on Sri Lanka and a policy of absorbing and assimilating the old Kandyan kingdom within this structure was initiated as a means of obliterating the sense of nationality among the Kandyans.
For all their earthiness and practicability these reforms possessed more than a tinge of genuine idealism. At the Colonial Office some of their more liberal and enlightened aspects were diluted if not eliminated altogether, while the civil servants on the island who actually implemented them had no sympathy for the liberalism which lay beneath the reforms. As a result, the reforms became a much more pedestrian business than they might have been if the recommendations of the two commissioners, accepted by the Colonial Office, had been implemented in the spirit in which they were conceived. Nevertheless, the Colebrooke–Cameron reforms were the first well-integrated system of reforms introduced after the establishment of British rule on the island. They marked the first systematic and successful attempt to break away from the Dutch pattern of colonial administration and to reject its basic assumptions in favour of a more enlightened form of government.