Till the beginning of Ward’s administration, the colonial government in Sri Lanka had shown little concern for the welfare of the peasant population and the focus of interest and attention had always been the development of the plantations (a regrettable but understandable situation, given the fact that the higher bureaucracy itself was deeply involved in plantation agriculture). Unfortunately, this neglect of peasant agriculture has not been confined to the British administrators; it has affected the island’s scholars as well. Their interest too has been concentrated on the plantations and peasant agriculture is one of the relatively unexplored fields in the social and economic history of nineteenth-century Sri Lanka. The present chapter does not pretend to redress the balance or to provide a comprehensive treatment of the subject in all its complexity, but it aims instead at concentrating on some broad themes, at posting a few questions and at framing answers to some of those questions. The state of our knowledge of many of these problems being what it is, the conclusions reached can be no more than tentative, provisional and conditional. Our three main themes will be irrigation policy, chēna cultivation and the grain taxes. All of them form part of the problem of peasant agriculture in our period. Other issues related to this main subject are discussed, but more briefly.
One distinguishing feature of this period is the sustained, though not unbroken, effort to rehabilitate the dry zone through a revival of the ancient irrigation network there. For the first time in several centuries a vigorous effort was made to repair and restore the dry zone’s irrigation facilities.1 But it is necessary to point out that in the first sixty years of British rule the irrigation network in the island had suffered a further deterioration. First of all, the scorched-earth tactics adopted during the Great Rebellion of 1817–18 destroyed the irrigation complexes in Uva, then a relatively prosperous region of the old Kandyan kingdom. Second, as a result of the collapse of the Urubokka and Kirama dams in the 1830s, nearly one-third of the rice lands of the Magam-pattu in the Southern Province went out of cultivation and the damage was not repaired for decades. Third, even the abolition of r•jak•riya had its destructive aspect for it involved the sudden demolition of the traditional communal machinery which had kept the village irrigation facilities and the major tanks that were still in use functioning and in a state of repair. The ‘rebellion’ of 1848 did shake the lethargy of the British administration and brought home to it the neglect of the peasants in general and irrigation in particular. Tennent tried to amend the Road Ordinance of 1848, to permit the use of labour organized under it for irrigation works as well, but the Secretary of State for the Colonies, Earl Grey, although sympathetic to the object in view, nevertheless refused to allow the amendment which Tennent sought.
All this emphasized the value of Ward’s initiatives in attempting to revive the ancient network of irrigation channels and tanks in the dry zone. His irrigation policy was characterized by a blend of humanitarianism and realism. If he regarded the restoration of irrigation facilities as a duty that the state owed to the people of the dry zone—a genuine humanitarian concern for the condition of the peasantry—there was beneath it a hard-headed realization that it was in the interest of the government to provide these facilities: it would contribute enormously to making the government popular and respected and, no less important, it would increase the government’s grain revenues and make these a major source of income for the state, as they were in all parts of British India. Besides, the rehabilitation of the ancient irrigation network might be the means of making the island less dependent on imports of rice. The drive and vigour which alone made an irrigation programme of this nature possible was provided by Ward. His personal example served as a stimulus to the civil service which, fortunately, was at last an efficient instrument of government action. Men of the calibre of Bailey, Rawdon Power and Birch provided him with the data (and ideas) essential for the task, supplementing what he had gathered for himself on his numerous tours in the provinces.
The first venture undertaken was the restoration, under Bailey’s direction, of the Uma Ela in Upper Uva. By July 1856, this had proved itself a financial success and it had also demonstrably been of benefit to the people of that area. The Uma Ela project served as unambiguous evidence of the industry of the peasants and their willingness to cooperate in ventures of this kind. As for the government, the success of this pioneering project helped to strengthen the conviction that such restorative schemes were practicable. One of the striking features of Ward’s irrigation policy lay in the lingering influence on it of the theories of Edward Gibbon Wakefield.2 The prerequisites of a coherent irrigation policy, in Ward’s view, were land, capital, water and labour. Land and water were freely available on the island and it needed only government aid (in lieu of capital) for these resources to be utilized. But there was another equally important consideration, namely, the availability of labour. The existence of a reasonably large population, in short, made the projects viable. Most parts of the dry zone, however, were sparsely populated and it was largely because of this that Ward was compelled to abandon his efforts to develop the Kantalai Tank (in 1856–57) and the Yodaväva (in 1853–59), along with his plans for the regeneration of the Tamankaduva district. The main impediments to the development of this latter region were sparseness of population, the prevalence of malaria and parangi (yaws) and the lack of roads, but the sparseness of population was considered the most formidable of these obstacles. As a solution to this, the idea of the colonization of the dry zone was revived. In 1847–48, Tennent had hopes of establishing colonies of Indian immigrant labourers in the present North-central Province. Ward, in contrast, thought in terms of settlements of peasants from the more densely populated regions of the Eastern Province (of which Tamankaduva was a part at this time). Kantalai was chosen as the site of the first such experiment in colonization, but the venture never really got started. Thus the focus of attention in the regeneration of irrigation facilities was shifted to the region around Batticaloa in the Eastern Province and the Magam-pattu of the Southern Province, where the financial prospects seemed brighter than in other parts of the dry zone and the general benefits anticipated from investments in irrigation appeared more promising than in the Anuradhapura and Polonnaruva districts, on the rehabilitation of which Ward had at first set his sights.
Ward’s contribution to irrigation activity in nineteenth-century Sri Lanka was nevertheless of far-reaching significance. First, the indifference towards the peasantry and irrigation which had prevailed for so long was at last reversed. Second, the combination of financial assistance and technical supervision from the state with voluntary local labour at the grass-roots level (the ‘grant-in-aid’ system, as it was called), which was introduced in the restoration and improvement of minor irrigation works during his administration, was widely used by his successors in the expansion of the irrigation programme which he had pioneered. During his administration, no water rate was levied on the landowners who profited from such works. The government hoped to recoup most of its investment from the anticipated augmentation of the paddy tax and land sales. Third, there was the outstanding contribution made by his Irrigation Ordinance (Ordinance 9 of 1856) ‘to facilitate the revival and enforcement of the ancient customs regarding the irrigation and cultivation of paddy lands’. This ordinance revived the traditional customs relating to paddy cultivation, in particular those relating to the peasants’ access to water from irrigation channels and the communal machinery for the settling of disputes relating to the use of this water. Up to this time redress for infringements of these customs could only be obtained in the civil courts (the traditional machinery for the enforcement of these customs having fallen into disuse under British rule) at the cost of considerable delay and the near-certainty of the financial ruin of both plaintiff and defendant. Ward’s Irrigation Ordinance was devised with certain interrelated objects which included elimination of the protracted and expensive process of litigation with regard to disputes of this nature and restoration of the traditional customs by means of communal machinery—generally the gansabh•vas—under the direct supervision of the government agents and their assistants. This ordinance was introduced as an experimental measure in a few places. The response from the people of these areas was so enthusiastic that it was regarded as sufficient justification for its extension to other parts of the dry zone and for its re-enactment in 1861 and 1867 (when its operation was made permanent) with an expansion of its scope. Originally, the powers of enforcement under this legislation were largely in the hands of British officials. In 1861 and 1867 provision was made for a greater use of native officials and gansabh•vas. The success of this measure led to its extension by Governor Sir Hercules Robinson, in 1871, in the Village Communities Ordinance of that year, to include other phases of village life, particularly the trial of minor offences through the same machinery.
One consequence of the renewal of interest in irrigation during Ward’s administration was that there were exaggerated hopes of quick financial returns on investment in these projects. After Ward’s departure from the island, his successor Sir Charles MacCarthy called for a searching examination of the financial implications of the irrigation works in the Batticaloa district. The review was initiated much too early (within three years of the inception of these projects) for a realistic assessment of their benefits to the country. MacCarthy in the meantime suspended further investment in irrigation and when the results of the review proved unfavourable, as might have been expected in the circumstances, this was treated as concrete evidence in support of his decision to call a halt to further investment on irrigation projects. The years 1860–65 were a period of retrenchment, of stringent cuts in government expenditure even though the economy was still buoyant. The Colonial Office was bent on using the surpluses obtained by these economies to extract a higher military contribution from the island, while MacCarthy gave the highest priority to financing the railway from Colombo to the coffee-producing regions.
There was a renewal of interest in irrigation during the administration of Sir Hercules Robinson and this was maintained over the next decade. At this stage, the Colonial Office was keenly interested in the restoration of irrigation works and two Secretaries of State, Lord Kimberley (1870–74) and Lord Carnarvon (1874–78), especially the latter, conscious of the neglect of irrigation in the past, encouraged Robinson and later Gregory to resume large-scale investment in irrigation projects. Robinson began on a more modest scale and a more cautious note than Ward. In the irrigation projects which he initiated, the beneficiaries were called on to repay the outlay to the government in ten annual instalments through a water rate. Thus the principle of directly recouping expenditure was introduced and became an integral part of British irrigation policy in Sri Lanka. But his successors did not apply this principle to minor irrigation works.
It was under Gregory that the renewal of interest in irrigation began to gather greater momentum and eventually had its most far-reaching effects in the regeneration of the heartland of the ancient irrigation civilization of the Sinhalese, the Anuradhapura and Polonnaruva regions. At the time, this huge territory was, as Gregory himself described it, in a ‘wretched state’ and lay ‘totally neglected’. A half-century earlier the ruins of these cities had been rediscovered,3 but the massive tropical forests which covered these regions and the malaria mosquitoes, which found congenial breeding grounds in the ruined tanks and channels, were insuperable obstacles to the regeneration of the old R•jarata. Appallingly poor communications accentuated their isolation from the rest of the country. The population was scattered, ill-nourished, disease-ridden and declining in numbers. These conditions had defeated Ward’s endeavours to restore some of the main irrigation works in the region. Gregory resumed this effort with the full backing of the Colonial Office, which now gave higher priority to expanding the irrigation programme than to the improvement of transport facilities on the island. His approach to the problems of this region was characteristically decisive and innovative. The initiation of large-scale irrigation works and the repair of irrigation channels there were preceded by a ‘political’ decision of great importance—the creation of a new provincial unit incorporating Nuvarakalaviya (from the Northern Province), Tamankaduva (from the Eastern Province) and the Demala Hatpattu (from the North-western Province). This was the North-central Province, the first new province established since 1845 and the first departure from the political principles which guided the demarcation of provincial boundaries since Colebrooke’s days.
The first phase of Gregory’s irrigation programme for the North-central Province was the repairing of village tanks. For this purpose he made extensive use of a practice initiated by Ward, of the villagers shifting the earth and the government providing the sluice and masonry without charge. The gansabh•vas provided the administrative machinery required for this purpose at the grass-roots level, and in accordance with custom the villagers were called upon to cooperate in the repair and upkeep of the tanks. In 1878, Gregory reported that ‘work is now going on vigorously upon hundreds of tanks in the North-central Province where the experiment was begun at the suggestion of Mr Dickson [the first government agent of the new province] and now applications for similar assistance are coming in from the Western, North-western and Northern Provinces’.4 Emboldened by the success that had attended the village tank project, Gregory moved on to the restoration of the great tanks: the Kantalai Tank at the meagre cost of £ 6,000 and—a far greater undertaking—the Kalavava, which was expected to irrigate 9,305.8 hectares of land. At the same time, improved communications, the completion of the northern road connecting Jaffna with Kandy and the road to Trincomalee through Tamankaduva reduced the isolation of that region. Only one obstacle remained, the most formidable of all: malaria.
Gregory was justifiably proud of the improvement that these projects had effected in the North-central Province. When he returned to the Kalavava region, he was impressed by the remarkable change there. The ‘wretched half-starved, dying—out population’ was now ‘plump well-fed sleek, healthy and well-to-do from the spread of irrigation...’.5 Looking back on this project, he remarked with understandable pride: ‘Never was a great social experiment more speedily and entirely successful.’6 Gregory’s administration was indeed the high-water mark of British achievement in irrigation activity in the nineteenth century.
While the direct financial recouping of investment had gained acceptance as the guiding principle of British irrigation policy, it became evident by the late 1870s that the state could not recover most of its expenditure on these ventures. But this did not put an end to investment on village irrigation projects as well as major schemes. Loans were occasionally employed to finance irrigation projects, although the general revenue was normally adequate for the purpose. Sir Arthur Gordon, governor from 1883 to 1890, financed the completion of restoration work on the Kalavava through a loan. In 1893 the Legislative Council stipulated that loans should be resorted to for undertakings involving Rs 300,000 or more in estimated expenditure. The fact is that while the government was not reluctant to use general revenues for investment in irrigation, there was undisguised hostility to this from European planters, whose representatives often gave expression to this disapproval in the Legislative Council when the votes on irrigation, which were part of the annual budget, came up for debate. This spurred Gordon into devising an important innovation in the financing of irrigation works. In 1887, an Irrigation Fund was established by annually setting aside a quarter of the proceeds of the grain taxes for expenditure on irrigation projects. When the taxes were abolished in 1892, the money for the Irrigation Fund was obtained from the import duties on rice and paddy and Rs 200,000 was set aside annually for this purpose. With the abolition of the paddy tax much greater emphasis was placed on the collection of the water rate.
The establishment of a separate Irrigation Department in 1900 seemed to indicate that an even greater emphasis would be placed on the extension of irrigation facilities in the first decade of the twentieth century. But by 1905 investment of government revenues on irrigation projects declined or ceased altogether. Although the annual expenditure varied with the state of the export trade, it was seldom less than 1.5 per cent of the total revenue in the twenty years between 1885 and 1904. In the period 1855–1904, the total amount spent by the government on irrigation was around Rs 13.5 million. The principal achievement—and object—of this programme of irrigation activity was the conversion of irregular into regular cultivation. There was nevertheless an expansion of the area under cultivation, moderate and modest in comparison to the investment, but in historical perspective the first such expansion in the dry zone for several centuries.
It is convenient to discuss the impact of irrigation activity on peasant agriculture under two headings, village works and large-scale projects. As for the first of these categories it would appear that the North-central Province and the North-western Province benefited most from the restoration of village tanks. Undoubtedly, these village irrigation works contributed to an extension of the area under paddy cultivation in these two provinces. In general, since many of the village tanks had not yet been linked to major irrigation schemes and were dependent on rainfall for their water supply, their restoration did not necessarily afford an absolute insurance against crop failures. But such occasions of food scarcity were much less frequent than before, although they did not disappear altogether. As for the large-scale irrigation projects, their greatest impact was on the Batticaloa district of the Eastern Province and the Matara district and Magam-pattu in the Southern Province. In both these regions there was a notable increase in population and an impressive improvement in rice production, although not solely due to the irrigation works. There were other factors too. The Batticaloa district became an area with a rice surplus, exporting its excess production to the adjoining Uva Province by land and to Jaffna and other regions by sea. Population increase in the Magam-pattu was 46.5 and 48.5 per cent respectively in the decades 1881–90 and 1891–1901. In the decade 1871–80 it had been a meagre 3.9 per cent. There was a substantial increase in the area under paddy and in the value of paddy lands after the completion of the Kirindi Oya in 1876. Large-scale irrigation works benefited the North-central and Northern Provinces as well, but not to the same extent as the other regions mentioned earlier.
On the basis of the meagre statistical information available, it appears that between 1850 and 1900 the area under paddy expanded by about 80,920 hectares in the whole island. Most of this expansion was stimulated by the irrigation programme described earlier, but there was also a substantial expansion of rice cultivation in the wet zone where irrigation was unimportant or unnecessary—in the Western Province alone it was as much as 28,350 hectares.
Two important points in regard to peasant agriculture at this time need emphasis. First, the increase in the area under paddy and in the actual production of paddy in the latter half of the nineteenth century was not a response to market forces or a commercialization of paddy culture on an island-wide basis. Except in the Batticaloa district and a few other areas, very little paddy was produced for sale. Subsistence agriculture was the norm. Second, given the increase in population during the period, the per capita acreage under paddy remained more or less constant despite the extension of the area under cultivation. But the expansion of cultivation kept in step with the growth of population. Nevertheless, the apparent increase in the area under paddy represents a not so insignificant achievement considering the fact that at the same time there was an expansion of the area under cash crops, namely, coffee, coconut and tea mainly; but also rubber.
These problems can be viewed in a more realistic perspective if we ask the question in a different form: why was expansion of rice cultivation or production not more rapid in the island generally, especially in the dry zone, during this period? Paddy producers in all parts of the island, whether large landowners or peasant cultivators, made no attempt to change the traditional techniques of cultivation and few technical innovations were attempted, much less adopted, in the course of the nineteenth century. Crop rotation was not resorted to and cultivators sowed their seed paddy by broadcasting rather than the more productive technique of transplanting. It is true that capital resources for innovations in production techniques were limited (in the case of small landowners) or non-existent (in the case of peasants), but even the richer landowners who commanded capital were not more venturesome than the others. As a rule, paddy production did not attract the big capitalist or large commercial firms, since the profits seemed so much more limited than in the island’s main commercial crops. No European or Indian entrepreneur sought to make a fortune through paddy cultivation—Colebrooke’s hopes in this regard expressed in 1832 proved to have been visionary. A few Sri Lankans did make the attempt. There was the Jaffna and Batticaloa Agricultural and Commercial Company launched by a group of Sri Lankans and Chetties in the late 1870s and early 1880s. It failed badly, as did ventures launched by other Sri Lankans in the early twentieth century. Low yields per acre were a general feature of paddy production in Sri Lanka regardless of variations in tenurial practices. Productivity of paddy lands on the island was among the lowest in Asia and this persisted till the late 1930s at least.
In the whole of the dry zone only one region—the Jaffna Peninsula—supported an efficient and intensive system of agriculture, but it had certain natural and other advantages which served to delineate the factors operating as constraints on efficient agriculture in other parts of the dry zone. There was, first, a dependable water supply through wells sunk into the limestone which underlay much of the peninsula. Neither malaria (which was endemic in most parts of the dry zone and singularly debilitating in its effects on the health of the people) nor yaws, the two principal health hazards of the dry zone, were much of a problem in Jaffna. The peasants of the Jaffna Peninsula were rigorous and resourceful, their techniques of cultivation painstaking and scientific (heavy manuring of the soil was resorted to) and the yields there were much greater than in the rest of the dry zone. While rice was the main crop, tobacco (a coarse variety exported mainly to south India) and garden crops supplemented increases in agriculture. Fishing was an important source of additional earnings.
In the wet zone there were other constraints on rice production. Paddy cultivation came into direct competition with export crops for the available labour resources and there was no question that the latter were regarded as being more profitable. There agriculturists and peasant cultivators had a wide range of more profitable alternatives before them. They—and particularly the agriculturists—did invest in paddy lands as well, but these investments were often for personal prestige and profit was seldom the main consideration. The easy availability of inexpensive and high-quality rice from abroad was hardly conducive to the expansion of local production at a time when the government was not inclined to impose protective tariffs. But the dependence on imports had other causes as well. The immigrant plantation workers from India had a marked preference for imported rice and would not touch the local varieties just like the upper classes among the local population, who had developed a taste for imported rice. Moreover, the local rice was inefficiently produced, variable in quality and not always available because of poor marketing facilities. In contrast, Burmese rice was cheap, uniform in quality, efficiently marketed and obtainable throughout the island.
The upshot of this was that the island was not self-sufficient in rice. More important, the increasing demand for rice, both from the local population and from the immigrant workers from India, did not—as it should have done—change the peasant from a subsistence cultivator into a producer for the market, and transform, that is, modernize rice production. In short, it brought the paddy cultivator into the modern sector of the economy without resort to the discipline and rigours of plantation life which the Sinhalese peasant loathed. Some of the reasons for this have been discussed earlier, but one other point needs to be mentioned: had the colonial administration in Sri Lanka taken a more positive attitude towards peasant agriculture, such a transformation might have been possible. The revival of interest in irrigation did not amount to a formulation of a comprehensive policy on peasant agriculture. This irrigation programme, as has been pointed out, arose from a mixture of motives—humanitarian, political and economic. It did not touch the wet zone, the most productive region on the island, where peasant agriculture and plantation production were in unequal competition. There were sporadic attempts at a more emphatic attitude of support for peasant landholdings, but at no stage were the implications of this fully realized, nor was there any sustained attempt to weave a comprehensive policy on peasant agriculture.
One of the peculiarities of peasant agriculture in Sri Lanka was that, in contrast to several other countries, dry farming or swidden agriculture was generally practised by peasants who also participated in the cultivation of rice and garden crops on a perennial basis. Chēna cultivation was economically more important in the dry zone than in the wet zone. In both it was a subsidiary source of income to the peasants, although it might well have been the main source in parts of the dry zone. The British viewed this slash-and-burn cultivation as a primitive, economically wasteful, destructive (of valuable timber resources) and demoralizing form of agriculture which produced the seemingly less nutritious dry grains rather than paddy. As a general rule the British were no more sympathetic to and tolerant of chēna cultivation than the VOC. Their attempts at restraining it were pursued more rigorously and effectively in the wet zone than in the dry zone. In the maritime provinces all land which was not recognized as private property was treated as belonging to the Crown and all chēna and forests (potential chēna) was regarded as Crown land. It was thus easier to impose controls on chēna cultivation there than in other parts of the wet zone and in the dry zone. In the Kandyan provinces, on the other hand, the British accepted the possibility of private or village ownership of chēna. But there were regional variations in the legal status accorded to chēna lands within the Kandyan provinces. Thus in the dry zone lowland districts of Nuvarakalaviya, forest or scrub land which villagers used for chēna cultivation was regarded as Crown property.
In the years 1850–80 one sees a hardening of the official prejudice against chēna cultivation. In general chēna cultivators required a special permit from the government. From the 1860s onwards the conditions on which such permits were granted became progressively more rigorous and in the 1870s very few permits were issued for chēna cultivation on Crown lands in the wet zone districts of the maritime provinces and also in the Kandyan region. At times the issue of chēna permits was entirely prohibited. (These controls only applied to lands which were deemed Crown lands.) The conventional wisdom of the day accorded very high priority to the conversion of chēnas into paddy fields and other forms of regular cultivation. Since population was expanding much more rapidly in the wet-zone districts of the south-west littoral and the adjacent Kandyan regions than elsewhere on the island, the restraints on chēna were perhaps justified by economic necessity. The wet-zone chēnas were increasingly being converted into paddy fields and garden lands and were used for cash crop production on smallholdings and plantations for the cultivation of coffee and coconut during this period and, later, rubber. As a result, chēnas in their traditional form became much less important in the economy of the wet-zone village. But even within the wet zone, chēna was not totally eclipsed. Some proprietors of privately owned land preferred to continue the practice. Controls over chēna cultivation, which the government began to impose in the latter part of the nineteenth century, only applied to lands which were deemed Crown lands. Till the mid-twentieth century much of the chēna land in the wet zone of the hill country (a small proportion of the cultivated area anyway) was privately owned.
In the dry zone, on the other hand, the peasants’ dependence on chēna was greater and for this reason chēna permits were issued on less stringent conditions, especially during periods of drought and food scarcity (not infrequent during the latter half of the nineteenth century), when chēna cultivation was the sole barrier against famine conditions. In parts of the Badulla district in Uva, droughts were so frequent during the 1860s that sometimes not a single crop of paddy could be sown for anything up to nine years. The interior regions of the North-western Province were notably susceptible to frequent crop failures, especially in the 1870s. The situation was not dissimilar in the Mannar and Mullaitivu divisions of the Northern Province in the same decade. Throughout the last quarter of the nineteenth century, there was great distress from frequent crop failures in lower Uva—Vellavaya, Bibile, Buttala and Alutnuvara—and the Valapane division of the Nuwara Eliya district.
The most generous interpretation one can place on this opposition to chēna cultivation was that it sprang from a misplaced benevolence, a desire to wean the peasants away from a wasteful form of agriculture—believed to be converting them into feckless and improvident individuals—to more settled, productive and socially beneficial types of cultivation. There was at the same time an urge to protect the forests from encroachment. While chēna policy was on the whole unimaginative in conception and ineffectual in application, its one redeeming feature was that it led to the establishment of climatic reserves and village forests or pasture resources, primarily to check soil erosion but also to meet future requirements of lands for village expansion. Excluding the Northern Province, North-central Province and the Eastern Province, 139,766.31 hectares of reserved forest, 4,765.6 of village forest and 40,528 of communal reserves and pasture were demarcated in the rest of the island in the forty years after 1885. In many areas the reserves came too late to check soil erosion and even in their other role of a reserve for potential agricultural land for the needs of the future, their impact was severely limited.
Chēna cultivation in the dry zone was a wise concession to the natural limitations of that region and its prohibition was a harsh exercise in bureaucratic rigidity so long as the peasants were not offered a feasible alternative. This alternative came only with the provision of irrigation facilities in the dry zone despite the limitations of the latter programme.
The grain taxes,7 the last major theme in this review of peasant agriculture in Sri Lanka in this period, were among the most controversial issues in the administration of the colony in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Their discussion needs to be introduced with a brief historical outline without which it would be difficult to understand much that happened.
The first point to note is that the British did not inherit a land tax from either the VOC or the Kandyan kings. Land revenue on the island took the form of taxes on grain, both paddy and dry grains. The grain taxes in operation under the British were a perpetuation of a system of which the roots went back to the times of the Sinhalese kings and which had been continued with modifications to suit their own purposes by the Portuguese and the Dutch. In the same way the nature, incidence and methods of imposition and collection of the taxes underwent change under the British. In the Kandyan provinces the grain taxes were limited to lands sown with paddy. The headmen in the Kandyan provinces and the viharagam and dēv•lēgam were exempt from these taxes. Exemptions were also granted to individuals for loyalty to the British during the Great Rebellion. The tax was also lighter (one-fourteenth of the produce) in those regions which had remained loyal during the Rebellion—the Kegalla and Ratnapura districts benefited substantially from this lighter tax—while the districts in which resistance was strongest paid a heavier tax (one-fifth of the produce). These exemptions, concessions and penalties apart, the tax was normally one-tenth of the gross produce. In the maritime provinces the taxes were also imposed on lands sown with grains other than paddy. These taxes on dry grains were limited to the littoral and within this region were of importance only in the Tamil districts of the north. As for the paddy tax, the Crown share ranged at first from one-fourteenth to a half, but the trend was to convert to one-tenth. Third, an import duty on rice and paddy was introduced in 1810 for revenue purposes rather than protection. The tendency was to link these duties to the paddy taxes as part of a common system of taxes. By 1840, the import duties grew progressively larger than the grain tax.
Originally, there were two methods of collecting the taxes: the aumani system, which prevailed under the Sinhalese kings, whereby the taxes were collected directly by state officials; and the renting system, the most widespread method of collection at the end of Dutch rule, where the right of collecting the tax was farmed out to the highest bidder. The British, while continuing these, introduced a third method in the 1830s, the commutation system under which the paddy grower had the option of paying the tax in cash at a rate fixed for each district by a commutation settlement.
The grain taxes in the period surveyed here were not by themselves particularly onerous—the land tax was so much higher in other parts of southern Asia—but the renting system, which was the predominant mode of collection, was widely regarded as harsh and oppressive and this brought the grain taxes as a whole under criticism. Colebrooke had urged the redemption of the grain tax by annual instalments spread over twenty years. This recommendation was accepted and owners were given the option of redemption either at a fixed rate in money or in kind, but the instalments were to be spread over eight and not twenty years. It would appear that from 1832 to 1842 redemption of the tax proceeded apace particularly in the Central Province, till in the early 1840s, at a time when the government’s coffers were depleted, it was realized that redemption tended to diminish the state’s resources, and from 1849 it was discouraged if not altogether prohibited. At the same time, the practices and regulations pertaining to the renting system were consolidated in Ordinance 14 of 1840, which sought to define and standardize the methods of collection and to establish some administrative machinery through which renters could use legal processes to recover taxes due from cultivators and producers and thus make tax evasion difficult.
In the late 1840s, Tennent excoriated the grain taxes in his Report on the Finance and Commerce of Ceylon and urged their abolition as part of his scheme of introducing an acreable land tax. The Colonial Office itself accepted this recommendation and the comments of a Whitehall committee which reviewed Tennent’s principal recommendations were as strongly critical of the grain taxes as those of Tennent himself. But when the proposal to introduce a land tax was abandoned, all hopes of abolishing the grain taxes disappeared. Commutation, however, continued unevenly and sporadically. The discouragement of redemption from 1842 does not appear to have checked commutation. Indeed, if there was any consistency over the next four decades in the official attitude to the grain taxes, apart from a determination to maintain them, it lay in the marked preference for commutation as against the renting system. Despite the adverse effect it had on government revenues, commutation was free from the criticisms which were persistently levelled against the renting system—that it was oppressive and extortionate. It had the positive advantage of eliminating the middlemen—the renters—who were looked upon as the main beneficiaries of the renting system. Officials believed that the share of the tax which eventually reached the treasury did not form half the actual amount paid to the renters by the peasantry. Nevertheless, despite this official preference for commutation settlements, the renting system held its own in several districts. An island-wide commutation remained an objective beyond the capacity of the administration to achieve. The commutation system was not without its own disadvantages—of which a lack of flexibility was the most prominent—and these were aggravated by Ordinance 5 of 1866, which empowered the government to seize the lands of those who defaulted on their payments of the commuted paddy tax and to sell the lands to recover arrears of tax. For about ten years these powers were seldom used, but they were then employed with deadly effect, as we shall presently see.
How was it that these taxes survived for so long when their abolition, or supersession had been recommended at regular intervals? There are three main reasons. The first and most important was the purely economic reason, namely, that the colonial administration feared that their abolition would severely strain the government’s financial strength. Between 1845 and 1868, the revenue from the import duty on rice with the yield of the grain tax together constituted a quarter of the government’s revenue. In the 1870s, the proportion was slightly lower, around one-fifth. Second, the tendency was to connect the import duty with the paddy tax in computing the loss of revenue anticipated from the potential abolition of the grain taxes, although import duty had little or nothing to do with the paddy tax. Thus when the Colonial Office in the late 1860s suggested a reduction of the import duty on rice, Governor Sir Hercules Robinson rejected this advice on the grounds that ‘the state of the revenue would not admit of the loss’. It was the same argument that Gregory had used for the retention of the grain tax. The government’s renewed interest in irrigation at this time served to strengthen its resolve to maintain this tax, both because—as Gregory urged—a permanent supply of water was the best of all available means for weaning the peasants from the renting system and because of the fear that investment in irrigation would need to be curtailed, if not abandoned altogether, if the government’s revenues were reduced by the abolition of the tax. Third, there was powerful support for the status quo from an influential section of the Sinhalese elite who feared that the probable alternative—a land tax—would be much more unfavourable to their interests. James Alwis, as Sinhalese representative in the Legislative Council, lent his support to the administration in its efforts to retain the grain taxes.
Critics of the grain taxes made skilful use of the contemporary distaste for food taxes in general to bring the former into disrepute. They were encouraged in this by the fact that even those who urged the maintenance of the status quo conceded that the grain taxes were abhorrent in principle; second, these critics focussed attention on the renting system and its abuses; and third, they argued that the paddy tax as a whole was a formidable restraint on the extension of paddy cultivation and the reclamation of wastelands. Pressures for the modification if not abolition of the grain taxes became too strong for the government to ignore and a commission was appointed in 1878 to examine these questions. By posing the question whether the people would prefer a land tax to one on paddy and dry grain, the commission only succeeded in obscuring and confusing the issues it was appointed to clarify. The answer to the question was inevitable—no one, not least the Sinhalese elite, welcomed the substitution of a land tax for the grain taxes. However, the recommendations of the commission did at least lead to one significant change. Through Ordinance 11 of 1878, a new system of compulsory commutation was introduced, superseding the prevailing system of commutation: under the new scheme not only was commutation compulsory but assessments were to be supervised by British civil servants and not by native officials. One unforeseen but inescapable consequence of this latter change was that a shortage of personnel prevented the introduction of the new system to all parts of the island simultaneously. The old system was thus superseded in stages; it survived in Uva till 1887 and in the Central Province till 1888.
In 1888, a startling disclosure by C.J.R. Le Mesurier, assistant government agent of Nuwara Eliya, in his annual administration report that ‘[1048] villagers... died of starvation... within sight of [Nuwara Eliya,] the sanatorium where our governors and high officials resort for health and lawn tennis...’ focussed attention once more on the grain taxes. Le Mesurier alleged that these deaths had occurred between 1882 and 1885 as the culmination of the process of enforcing the payment of the grain tax and implementing Ordinance 5 of 1866, with the utmost stringency, to seize the lands of those in arrears of tax, to evict such persons and to sell their land to recover the arrears of tax. He pointed out that at this time the peasants did not have the means of paying the tax.
Inevitably, the establishment closed ranks and Le Mesurier came under attack. His arguments, his statistics and his judgement were alike ridiculed or severely criticized. But even if the statistical information may have been flawed, his analysis has stood the test of critical examination by scholars.8 It would appear that in the 1880s landowners and peasants had defaulted in the payment of the paddy tax and arrears of tax had accumulated on a large scale at Ratnapura, Galle, Batticaloa and the Kandyan region. The problem was most acute in some of the Kandyan areas where the collapse of the coffee industry had deprived the people of a ready source of money with which to pay these taxes, especially when, as often happened at this time, the paddy and chēna crops failed. At the same time there had also been a sharp fall in the government revenues and, as in similar circumstances in the past, the government turned its attention to the peasants as a source of taxation. No new tax was devised, but Ordinance 5 of 1866, which had been little used in the past, was implemented to the very letter. This caused acute distress, especially in the Valapane division of the Nuwara Eliya district and in Udakinda in Uva.
When these matters were ventilated in the House of Commons, Governor Gordon made a mild and half-hearted defence of the grain taxes. But privately he conceded the basic accuracy of Le Mesurier’s disclosures. He informed Gregory, living in retirement in England, that ‘as to the Grain Tax, I would only add between ourselves, that the harsh enforcement of the payment of arrears in parts of the Central Province and Uva was unquestionably the direct cause of a large number of deaths from want’.9 The Valapane evictions and Le Mesurier’s disclosures discredited the entire system of grain taxes, created an atmosphere adverse to their continuation and eventually helped Sir Arthur Havelock (Gordon’s successor as governor) in 1892 to convince the Colonial Office of the need to abolish them altogether. In this final phase of their campaign, the abolitionists found Gordon’s administration—and especially Gordon himself—in a hesitant, defensive mood, and they made the most of this. Critics of the grain taxes gained an ally with the appointment of T.B. Panabokke as Kandyan member in the enlarged Legislative Council in 1889. Together with Ponnambalam Ramanathan, the Tamil representative, he used the legislature as a forum for outspoken criticism of the taxes. In the past, Sinhalese representatives in the Legislative Council had either supported the maintenance of these taxes or had remained silent when these issues came up for discussion. Besides, the campaign against the taxes was taken up by the newly formed Ceylon National Association and its contribution to the abolition was its most constructive achievement in the whole of its existence. The campaign for abolition owed much to the press over the years, to George Wall and the Ceylon Independent within the island, and to the Cobden Club and radical opinion in Britain with the support of the Manchester Guardian. Ranged against them had been A.M. Ferguson and John Ferguson and their newspaper, the Ceylon Observer, with the assistance of the Ceylon Patriot.
It is perhaps appropriate that this survey of peasant agriculture should end with this discussion of agrarian distress and rural poverty in the Kandyan region. Throughout the last quarter of the nineteenth century, and in the first decade of the twentieth, there are frequent references in published official documents to famines, conditions of near-famine, chronic rural poverty, destitution and, above all, starvation in many parts of the country, especially the dry zone. After a century of rule, the British colonial administration had not succeeded in improving the living standards of the rural population in most parts of the country.10