“There is in our harbour of Colombo a race of people of fair skin and comely withal. They don jackets of iron and hats of iron; they rest not a minute in one place; they walk here and there; they eat hunks of stone and drink blood; they give two or three pieces of gold and silver for one fish or one lime; the report of their cannon is louder than thunder when it bursts on the rock Yughandara. Their cannon balls fly many a gauva and shatter fortresses of granite”.
This was the report conveyed to the King of Kotte, Vira Parakrama Bahu VIII when the Portuguese arrived off Colombo on the 15th November, 1505. Portugal was one of the first European countries to make use of the discovery of the sea route to the East to make its presence felt in Asia. They came in search of spices, and Ceylon was the best source of cinnamon at that time. Their superior naval power and the use of gun powder made them irresistible to the kings then ruling Ceylon. The clue to their success against native armies is contained in the last sentence of the above-quoted report carried to the king of Kotte. “Their cannon balls fly many a gauva and shatter fortresses of granite”.
But, even so, it was not altogether a one-sided affair. The Portuguese encountered stiff resistance and were never able to conquer the whole of the island. Although the then king of Kotte could not resist the request of the Portuguese for permission to build a fort in Colombo, and although a later king of Kotte, Don Juan Dharmapala, after his conversion to Christianity, was to make the king of Portugal his heir in 1580, resistance by other Sinhalese kings and princes continued. In fact, it is this period of history that records some of the most militant wars by the Sinhalese against the foreign European conquerors. The most famous of these exploits were the wars of resistance against the Portuguese carried on by Mayadunne and his son, Rajasingha I. The most famous of these battles, where the Portuguese were decisively defeated by Rajasingha, was the one at Mulleriya, 9 miles from Colombo, in 1559. The other was the famous annihilation of the Portuguese army by Rajasingha II in 1638 at Gannoruwa, to which place they had retired after sacking Kandy. Only 38 Europeans are reported to have escaped to tell the tale.
The end of the Portuguese rule was not far off. Another European Power, Holland, was now eyeing Ceylon, which was of great strategic importance to these maritime powers, as it lay in the centre of the great trade routes to the East from Europe. Further, in Trincomalee, Ceylon possessed the best natural harbour in the East, from which the Bay of Bengal and the Indian Ocean could be controlled. In 1802, after the British had conquered it, it was described by the younger Pitt in Parliament as “the most valuable colonial possession on the globe .... giving to our Indian empire a security it had not enjoyed from Its first establishment“. Trincomalee was to enjoy this strategic importance till the emergence of the air force as the most important arm in recent times. In addition, as has already been pointed out, the fact that Ceylon was one of the world’s best suppliers of good quality cinnamon was in itself an attraction. In 1638 Rajasinha II of Kandy signed a treaty with the Dutch. He promised them certain trading rights in return for help to expel the Portuguese from Ceylon. The Sinhalese king undoubtedly thought that he could use the contradictions between these two great European rivals to his own country’s advantage. But he was mistaken.
The superior maritime power of the Dutch ensured the defeat of the Portuguese. The last stronghold of the Portuguese in Ceylon, Jaffna, fell in 1658. The Dutch quietly slipped into the shoes of the Portuguese–despite all treaty obligations. The Sinhalese king was duped.
The impact of Portuguese rule on Ceylon was great, but not lasting. They brought with them a totally new civilisation, a new religion–Catholicism–and new customs and habits, as the first report of their arrival accurately portrayed it. They opened the way for intercourse with the more advanced West. But their century and a half rule over the greater part of the country (minus the hill country) was a ferocious one. Religious persecution of the worst order, which included the forcible conversion as well as the destruction of the places of worship of other religions, and intense and naked exploitation of the country – devoid of any of the refinements which later conquerors, particularly the British, were to introduce–marked their rule. They left behind the most reactionary of all religions to be found in Ceylon today–the Catholic Church. Ceylon also inherited from them the most popular names used by its inhabitants today – Perera, Silva, Fernando, etc.
The Dutch occupation of Ceylon, which lasted till 1796, was comparatively uneventful. They ruled only over the maritime provinces. Their main concern was the extraction of as much cinnamon as possible from the island. At that time, most of the cinnamon grew wild in the king’s territories. This meant that the Dutch had to be on terms with the king at Kandy. The Dutch concentrated on trade. Apart from cinnamon, they also built up an export trade in arecanuts, elephants, chank shells, etc. It is to be noted that, by this time, rice for local, consumption was being imported from India. Pepper and coffee began to be cultivated. The cultivation of coconut in a big way had also started.
The Dutch introduced the Roman Dutch Law to Ceylon and codified the customary law of the Tamil country, called the Thesavalamai. Both remain law to this day. This was their biggest contribution to Ceylon.
In several respects, the Dutch foreshadowed many things that the British were to introduce. They introduced commercial crops, which the British were to develop into an economy. They also introduced the school system, on which the British were to build. If the Portuguese resorted to forcible conversion, the Dutch resorted to the more subtle method of material incentives. All offices under the government were open only to those who had been baptised. The Dutch also showed how to make religion and education effective weapons in their aim of cultural aggression against the people of Ceylon. The British perfected this system. The Church and the school became the centre of imperialist cultural aggression, just as much as the plantation became the centre of imperialist economic aggression.
The British replaced the Dutch in Ceylon in 1796. The defeat of the Dutch was mainly due to the decline of their sea power in the Atlantic. With the coming of the British, who were the first and only European power to conquer the whole of the island, we come to a period which was to bring about many radical changes in the economy and institutions of the island.
The first twenty-five years of British rule in Ceylon, during which period they ruled only the maritime provinces which had been under the Dutch, were relatively uneventful. From 1796 to 1802, Ceylon was administered by the Madras government of the East India Company. It was in 1802 that it was made a Crown Colony and administered directly from England. An attempt to change the system of collecting revenue brought serious disturbances during the first year of British rule. As a result, there was a return to the former system, as it obtained under the Dutch.
The British Government at home was too pre-occupied with the Napoleonic wars in Europe to have paid much attention to conquering the whole of Ceylon. But, local governors were very ambitious, and the almost continuous rivalries and intrigues of the Kandyan chiefs against their king prodded these ambitions.
Almost coinciding with the arrival in Ceylon of the first British Governor, Frederic North, appointed directly from England, was the accession to the Kandyan Throne in 1797 of the last king of Kandy, Sri Vikrama Rajasinha. He was put on the throne by the Chief Adigar, Pilimatalawa, who is also suspected of having been his father. But Rajasinha did not prove to be such a pliable instrument in the hands of the Chief Adigar. So, the latter started intriguing with the British against the king.
What is referred to as the first Kandyan War took place in 1803, when the British army marched up to Kandy, which had been evacuated by the Kandyans, and installed their puppet, Muttu Swamy, on the throne. But the British were unable to hold Kandy. Handicapped by lack of communications, and badly affected by ill health and the monsoon, the British were forced to withdraw. The Kandyans unleashed guerrilla tactics and intercepted the British Army on the 24th June, 1803, and put it to the sword on the banks of the Mahaveli. It was almost a replica of the disaster that overtook Napoleon on his famous march on Moscow.
Though the Kandyans warded off this first attempt by the British to subjugate them, their final doom was to be brought from within. In 1811, Pilimatalawa paid for his intrigues with his head, and was succeeded as Chief Adigar by Ehelepola. He soon followed in his predecessor’s footsteps, and entered into treasonable negotiations with the British through the English civil servant, D’Oyly, who was well versed in Sinhalese, When the king suspected treason, Ehelepola tried to raise his people in the Sabaragamuwa against the king, but failed. He, thereupon, crossed over to the British on the 23rd of May, 1814, and, with his active help, the British launched the second Kandyan War, which led to the conquest of the Kandyan Kingdom.
Thus, treachery and internal dissension played the major role in the downfall of the Kandyan Kingdom in 1815. On the 2nd of March, 1815, Brownrigg received the surrender of the Kandyan chiefs at the Audience Hall of Kandy. A week later was enacted the signing of the farce called the Kandyan Convention. There are those who still try their best to pretend that this Convention was an agreement between equals, by which the Kandyan Chiefs transferred allegience from Rajasinha to the British King George III. Such pretentions have no legs to stand on. It was a treaty dictated by a conqueror and forced on the conquered.
There is no doubt that the opportunistic Article V of the Convention declared that “Buddhism and the Agama (the religion) of the Devas were inviolable and that the sangha, its places of worship, shrines and ceremonies were to be protected”. This was no doubt an attempt to placate local feelings. But it was to be the target of attack by Christian Missionaries. The 1818 rebellion gave the British cause to negate this promise.
It was nothing surprising that the ancient feudal order of the Sinhalese kings had to go under when faced with the superior economic and fire power of the British conquerors. Feudalism did put a feeble resistance, as in the first and second Kandyan wars. But the result was foredoomed. The rebellion of 1815, which is usually referred to as the Wellassa rebellion, spearheaded by one of the Chiefs, who had signed the 1815 Convention, Keppitipola, was the last flicker of this dying flame. The Matale rebellion of 1848, associated with the names of Gongalagoda Banda (David from Peliyagoda) and Purang Appu (both low-country Sinhalese) was a tame affair in comparison, and was put down without the loss of a British life. Today, attempts are made to make Keppetipola out to be a national hero. It is doubtful whether such a claim could be sustained. Keppetipola was not a national hero in the sense we understand it today. He did not fight on behalf of the Sinhalese people against the foreign invaders, because he thought that the latter had deprived the people of their cherished independence. The conception of the people having any rights would have been alien to the Kandyan chiefs. When Keppetipola rebelled, he did so against the usurpation of the traditional powers of the Kandyan chieftains by the British. The chief had thought that the British king or his representative would merely take the place of Sri Wickrama Rajasinha, and had hoped that the rest of the set-up would continue as of old.
In this, they were in for a rude shock. The British meant to be the real rulers. It was this realisation that made a section of the chiefs to rebel. They were fighting for the restoration of the old feudal order. Independence for the people never entered into their calculations. With the suppression of the revolt, the Kandyan feudal class reconciled itself to British over-lordship – although there were to be a few more minor uprisings. Very soon, they became active collaborators with the British conquerors, and joint oppressors of the people. They provided the social base for foreign rule – a role which they have consistently played ever afterwards.
This supine and servile attitude of the decadent Kandyan feudal chiefs, to foreign imperialism has persisted till modern times. When Bandaranaike began his crusade against the U.N.P. in 1951, he did not have the support of any of these feudal chieftains – either from his father’s side or from his wife’s side. That is why he never trusted them and kept them at arm’s length when he formed his government in 1956. If some of them later joined the Bandaranaike band wagon (after 1959) it must have been because they felt reassured about the continuance of the status quo.
The Kandyan provinces were at first ruled as a separate province, but later amalgamated into a united administration of the whole island. One of the first tasks of the British, after the conquest of Kandy, was to link Kandy with Colombo, Trincomalee and Kurunegala by military roads – thus removing the decided advantage that the hill capital had enjoyed, because of its lack of access by good roads. The roads were built by means of compulsory labour ’ Rajakariya’ or work in the king’s service. Ceylon had again been unified–this time under a foreign European power.
With the unification of the island under British rule, a new chapter in Ceylon’s history begins. We come to the introduction of the colonial plantation economy with which the economic fate of the country is linked to this day. To understand the fundamental nature of the change that took place, it is essential to trace, at least in a bare outline, the features of the economy that prevailed in Ceylon under the Sinhalese kings for nearly two thousand years.
The economy that prevailed in Ceylon before the European conquest destroyed it can be described as a feudal, natural economy. It was a self-sufficient economy, with money playing, little or no role. People produced all the things they needed and exchanged their surplus for things they lacked. Trade with the outside world existed in articles like gems, pearls, spices, for which Ceylon had always been famous.
A most remarkable description of this kind of a natural economy as it existed in the Kandyan kingdom is given in the famous book on Ceylon by Robert Knox. Knox had been a prisoner in the Kandyan kingdom for over 19 years, between 1660 and 1679, and wrote his book after his escape from the island.
Here is an extract from his book; “All sorts of money is here very scarce. And they frequently buy and sell by exchanging commodities. They have a small traffic among themselves, occasioned from the nature of the Island. For that which one part of the Country affords, will not grow in the other. But in one part or other of this land they have enough to sustain themselves, I think, without the help of commodities brought from any other country; exchanging one commodity for another; and carrying what they have to other parts to supply themselves with what they want”.
Here is a perfect description of a natural economy under feudalism by an eye witness. There is no doubt that, left to itself, Ceylon would have developed towards capitalism in its own time. But this was not to be. Instead, foreign imperialist invasion smashed the backward and stagnant feudal economy that existed in Ceylon and set up the new, colonial plantation economy. This was basically a money economy. But it was not capitalism in the full sense of the word. The development of local capitalism would not have been in the interests of British imperialism, which wanted Ceylon as a producer of raw materials and a market for its manufactured goods. Therefore, at every turn, it stifled every attempt at capitalist development. What it permitted and nurtured was a colonial economy, which drained vast profits made out of the natural resources of the island to enrich the metropolitan country.
One result of foreign conquest was the final abandonment and decay of the vast irrigation system, which had been the pride of the Sinhalese kings and which had provided the basis for the prosperity of the Sinhalese civilisation when it was at its height. Tanks were left unrepaired to go to ruin, or were sacrificed for the new roads, some of which were built over tank bunds. Gradually, the forest closed over them, and thus they remained till they were reclaimed in this century. Starting from Dutch times, the staple food of the Ceylonese–rice–began to be imported.
As has already been mentioned, the British imperialists introduced the plantation economy into Ceylon. Coffee growing had already begun under the Dutch, but its development as a commercial crop started in British times. Later tea took the place of coffee, when the latter was destroyed by a pest. The planting of rubber also began on a big scale.
These plantations needed large extents of land, and a large labour force. From where did the British get them? Like in all cases of primitive accumulation of capital, in Ceylon, too, the primitive accumulation of capital (in this case in the form of land) took place through large scale plunder. It was done through the Waste Land Ordinance of 1897 and the Grains Tax of 1878.
When the British came to Ceylon, the Dutch had given a legal system to the maritime provinces over which they ruled. People who owned land had some kind of title deed to prove it. Not so in the Kandyan provinces. Here, all land belonged theoretically to the king. Through his nobles, the king farmed out his lands to the peasants. This tenure was secure and could be transferred only if the peasant lost the confidence of the king. But generally it was held in perpetuity and passed from generation to generation. This was well understood. But there were no title deeds to prove it.
By means of the Waste Lands Ordinance, the British declared all lands to which the people could not prove ownership to belong to the Crown. Even if a certain number of peasants could prove ownership of their paddy fields they tilled, they could prove no ownership to the communal forest and the common pasture where their cattle grazed, and which was so much a part of the village economy and without which the cultivation of the paddy fields was impossible. Large numbers of peasants were thus forced to sell their fields and emigrate. These lands and the forests were declared to be crown property and sold to British planters at ridiculously low prices – sometimes, it is reported, at less than fifty cents per acre. Later, Ceylonese planters, too, were allowed to buy Crown land. If there were any peasants still left in ownership of the land, the Grains Tax looked after them. This was a particularly odious piece of taxation, which was aimed only at the peasant, while it exempted the land owner, temple lands, etc. Unable to pay this onerous tax, a large number of peasants, who were still left, sold their lands and left. Many of them are reported to have died of starvation.
In much the same way, the British also expropriated temple lands under the Temple Lands Registration Ordinance No. 10 of 1856. In effect, this, too, affected the peasants, because these lands had always been given to them on service–tenure. On the Land Commissioners, appointed to administer this Ordinance, declaring the absence of legal title to the lands, thousands of acres of temple lands were seized by the government.
It is necessary to report that In the task of expropriating the lands from the Kandyans, the British were helped by a section of the feudal chiefs. In the process, these chiefs helped themselves to large tracts of land. This, In fact, is the source of all the present big nindagams. Governor Clifford’s cynical comment was, “The speculative work of buying up doubtful titles from villagers was for the most part conducted by their own countrymen”.
Thus was the Kandyan peasant robbed of his land by the British conquerors. Though carried out under the semblance of legal fiction, it was nothing but plunder. It is good to have this well in mind. Because, while remembering that the Kandyan peasants had been robbed of their lands, the present-day chauvinist tends to forget who robbed the Kandyan lands. They even tend to substitute the innocent plantation worker of Indian origin, who himself was a victim of Imperialist exploitation, in place of the real culprit–the British imperialist, who still owns the greater part of the lands his forefathers robbed.
The evictions of the Kandyan peasants from their lands parallels a similar eviction of the English peasants by their feudal landlords on the eve of the Industrial Revolution, as a result of the change from wheat farming to sheep farming. But, whereas the great majority of the English peasants wandered to the newly established towns to work in the factories that had lately sprung up, and thus became converted into the proletariat, no such luck awaited the evicted Kandyan peasants. The British did not employ them in any big scale in the plantations they opened up. There could probably be two reasons for this. One was that, after the 1818 and 1848 rebellions, the British were suspicious of the Sinhalese. Secondly, they may have preferred immigrant labour, whom they could have at their beck and call, and who would work right throughout the year.
Thus, the evicted Kandyan peasants were left to die a slow death, or, at best, to eke out a miserable existence. That this was so is borne out by the report of the 1935 Land Commission, which states that, in Ceylon, the peasantry was dying out as a class. In order to stop this process, the Commission recommended that all alienation of Crown lands to private capitalists or to companies be stopped and that, in future, Crown lands be given only to peasants. Thus arose the colonisation schemes of the nineteen thirties. This land policy was followed by all governments up to the 1965 UNP government, when it was reversed, and Crown land again alienated to private capitalists and companies.
From where did the British planters obtain their labour? They looked to South India, whose economy they had already despoiled, and where there was a large body of unemployed people. With the help of Indian kanganies, these poor workers were inveigled by false promises to come to Ceylon to slave in the plantations–first to open them up, and then to work in them. Hundreds died because of the inhuman methods of transportation. The conditions under which they were forced to live must have been so unhygienic that diseases such as cholera broke out. Things must have been pretty bad, because the Government of India had to intervene and the force of the Government of Ceylon (both governments were British, though separate) to enact certain minimum regulations to govern the housing, health, sanitation and other conditions of living of these immigrant workers. Even the worst exploited need to be kept alive so that they could continue to be exploited.
Thus, it came to pass that the British imperialists, in the middle of the last century, brought a large population of Indian immigrant workers, and dumped them in the midst of the Kandyans, and thereby left for posterity a legacy with continues to be-devil Ceylon’s politics to this day. Thus, it must be clearly understood that it was the British imperialists who were responsible for bringing Indian immigrant labour into Ceylon. Further, from the time of the first representative institutions, like the State Council, this policy of importing immigrant Indian labour for the plantations was supported by the Ceylonese bourgeois politicians. Every year, the State Council passed funds to subsidise this immigration. All the bourgeois leaders, from D. S. Senanayake to S. W. R. D. Bandaranaike, acquiesced in it. The latter-day anti-Indian heroes need to be reminded of this!
Along with the Indian worker came the Indian traders, money lenders and the rest of the parasites, who were to exploit Indian and Ceylonese alike. There is a saying in Africa that whereever the British Imperialist went, he took an Indian in his pocket. It certainly seems to have been true in regard to Ceylon. It is to the rapacy and inhuman exploitation by the Indian traders and money-lenders that we must look for the source of much of the anti-Indian feeling which has, unfortunately, been cleverly turned by designing politicians against the workers of Indian origin.
This background to what is now called the Ceylon-Indian problem, or alternatively the problem of the statelessness of several hundred thousand workers of Indian origin must be fully understood, if we are to correctly answer the question: Who are our enemies, who are our friends? It is general ignorance or lack of a proper understanding of this background that has enabled the reactionaries, both foreign and local, to divide the revolutionary ranks in Ceylon by sinister anti-Indian propaganda, and to alienate the plantation workers of Indian origin, who incidentally form a substantial section of Ceylon’s working class, from the rest of the Ceylonese population.
This division has cost the revolutionary movement dearly. That is why it is essential to point out that both the workers of Indian origin and the Sinhalese peasants are victims of the same British imperialism, and, therefore, constitute natural allies and not enemies. A lasting solution can proceed only from such an approach.
Thus, as has been seen, the plantation economy introduced by the British developed on the basis of the land (capital) robbed from the Kandyan peasants and the labour of the Indian immigrant worker. The entire economy of the country was built around the business of growing, manufacturing and exporting tea and rubber. Everything else was dependent on it. This has always been the pattern of imperialist exploitation, because the near-complete dependence of the economy on one or two export crops makes it extremely vulnerable to imperialist pressure. The imperialists are able to manipulate the economy according to their will.
Thus, it will be seen that all the foreign banks that established themselves in Ceylon came here to finance the plantation industry out of the profits they had already made out of imperialist exploitation in Asia. The names of some of the banks, like the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank Ltd. even suggest from where their profits had originated. The engineering firms, like Walker & Sons, Commercial Co., originally came here to install, maintain and keep in repair the machinery needed by the tea and rubber factories. Having come here, they started to import cars as a sideline. The engineering workshops came up to service and repair the cars.
If one looks at the roads, or the railways, the best are those that lead to the plantations–to Kandy, Nuwareliya and Badulla – because it is along these roads and railways that the tea and rubber exports have to move down to Colombo. The reason, why so much foreign aid was granted for the expansion of Colombo harbour was because we have more than doubled tea production during the last three or four decades, and these have to be shipped abroad expeditiously.
A lot of profit was extracted out of the tea and rubber plantations, particularly tea. Vast fortunes were made by the British planters. The original capital that was invested was doubled several times over in many cases. Ceylon tea became world famous. In fact, Ceylon and tea became so synonymous that there was a time when Ceylon was referred to as Lipton’s tea garden.
But the opening of the plantations in the hill country, where the tea grew best, had terrible repercussions for Ceylon–other than the exploitation of her resources for the profits of the foreign conqueror. One of the most barbaric acts perpetrated by the British was to cut down the forests that adorned our hill tops to make way for the tea plantations. As any biologist would tell us, forest trees on hill tops perform a useful function. They cool the rain laden clouds and transform them into rain. Secondly, the strong tree roots prevent the rain water from rushing down all at once, and instead enables it to percolate under the soil and flow down as perennical streams.
The cutting down of the forest trees meant that the rain water would now rush down all at once. Further, as the soil round the tea bushes had to be loosened by forking for purposes of fertilising, the loose sub-soil, which is the most fertile portion of the soil, was washed down by the rain water into the rivers. There is no river in Ceylon which does not run brown or muddy. This is the problem we know as soil erosion. Over a number of years, as a result of the soil that has been washed into the rivers, the river beds started rising. The result was that they could not hold the rain water during heavy showers and this caused flooding. Floods in one season, and draught in another –this was the result of the barbaric policy of the British in cutting down the forests on our hill tops. Even when the ancient irrigation tanks were reclaimed in the nineteen thirties, they could not get sufficient water as of old, because a lot of the rain water was wasted as floods before it reached the tanks. Thus, the British created the main obstacle to Ceylon becoming self-sufficient in food, because it is today accepted that, if there were sufficient irrigation facilities to enable the cultivation of the entirety of the aswadamised lands for both seasons in the year, Ceylon would be well on the way to self-sufficiency.
Along with the intense economic exploitation of the country, the British also resorted to diverse forms of cultural aggression against the people, in order to consolidate their political base. In this connection, the Dutch had already laid the foundation by the establishment of schools, and the encouragement of missionary work. The British built on these.
The attempt to Europeanise the native by means of the English language and the Christian religion was begun. Knowledge of English not only because important but also remunerative. The British also wanted an army of English-educated clerks to man the lower rungs of their administrative services. These were produced through the new schools that were set up. As schools, like in England, were run by missionary organisations, Christianity and the English language marched forward side by side. Very soon, an Academy was started for imparting higher education for the ’natives’.
The English were very far-sighted. They were probably the most experienced of the imperialist powers. Along with the use of brute force whenever they felt it was needed, as in 1818, 1848 or in 1915, they also knew how to sweeten the pill. They used education, especially higher education in British Universities, as an instrument for cultural subversion–to produce a tribe of brown Englishmen who aped the master in language, dress and habit, and whose one ambition was to transform Ceylon into a “little bit of England”. It is reported that, when Governor Maitland left Ceylon in 1811, two sons of Mudaliyar de Saram went with him for higher education in English Universities. The procession had begun.
These University educated men who returned from England were to influence Ceylon’s politics for a considerable period, and to fashion it on the model of what they had seen in England. Their influence persists even to this day. For a good part, it was an unimaginative and slavish imitation of alien institutions, which could not possibly thrive in the local setting, It produced such ludicrous sights as the judges of the Supreme Court wearing wigs–disregarding the fact that Ceylon has a hot, tropical climate; or the attempt to transplant the English parliamentary system and the theory of one man – one vote into a society divided almost rigidly on the basis of caste and race.
But some good also resulted, since this inter-change was responsible, in the period after the first world war, for the introduction of the seed of revolutionary Marxism into Ceylon. Higher education in English also meant that the Ceylonese–even though only a small minority–now had access to modern knowledge, particularly scientific learning.
A reaction to this worshipping of everything English was bound to come: and when it did come it was in the form of a movement for Buddhist revival and glorification of the ancient past of the Sinhalese. This movement, which was a pale parallel of the more vigorous literary renaissance movement that had arisen in India (particularly Bengal), was led by men like Migettuwatte Gunananda Thero, Anagarika Dharmapriya, Ananda Coomarasamy and Arumuga Navalir with the help of foreign theosophites, like Oldcott and Annie Besant. Although we cannot read too much into the activities of these men and women, their work had a progressive content inasmuch as any opposition to the religion associated with the conquerors was bound to rouse anti-imperialist and nationalistic feelings.
Inasmuch as the foreign invaders had carried out their policy of cultural aggression by means of the school and the church, those connected with the movement for a Buddhist revival used the same media for the counter-attack. Institutions such as the Buddhist Theosophical Society and the Hindu Board of Education were formed, and these organisations started to compete with the Christian missionaries by establishing Buddhist and Hindu schools, and to impart an education, which was necessarily tinged with nationalism and thus laid the basis for anti-imperialism. It could thus be said that in the movement for the revival of Buddhism and Hinduism were seen the early anti-imperialist yearnings of the people and a desire to assert their national pride.
At the same time or along with the movement for Buddhist revival, there also arose the temperance movement in Ceylon–a movement, which, in the eyes of the British, had an anti-British political slant. The British government had established a monopoly of trade in arrack, and in order to increase their revenue, the right to sell arrack was farmed out to men who established taverns in every village of any size throughout the interior. The purpose sought to be achieved seems to have been the same as that which was sought by the forcible introduction of opium into China by the British. In any event, some of those who made big money through arrack renting emerged to lead the temperance movement, having moved their capital into the plantation industry. Some of these men were to provide the bourgeois leadership for Ceylon in the period after the first world war.
At the same time as when the British were carrying out their policy of cultural aggression through school and church, they were also busy introducing into the colony political reforms, which were aimed at winning the consent of the slaves to their slavery. The British knew the art of exploitation with refinement–unlike the Portuguese. They set about the task of drawing the Ceylonese into the work of assisting the British in their administration of the island. Retaining real power in their hands they gave, little by little, the illusion of power to the “natives”! For this purpose, various reforms were introduced from time to time. The process was set going with the establishment of a legislative council and an executive council on the recommendations of the Colebrooke-Cameron Commission, whose report was published in 1831-32. First, the inclusion of unofficial members, later the introduction of the principle of elected representatives, then an unofficial majority and so to universal franchise, and the executive committee system under the Donoughmore constitution–these were some of the semblences of power which the British conceded to the Ceylonese, while they themselves held tight to their reign over the armed forces, public administration and finance–safeguarded by the veto power of the British Governor.
The British had no difficulty in finding able men on the Ceylon side, who were willing to play the game according to the British rules. Men like E. W. Perera, James Pieris, Ponnampalam Ramanathan and Ponnampalam Arunachalam alternatively pleaded and demanded more and more reforms. They sent regular petitions and went on successive deputations to Whitehall, and formed associations like the Reforms League and, ultimately, the Ceylon National Congress to keep alive their agitation.
They were all able bourgeois reformists, who wanted a better deal for the Ceylonese within the existing framework. They never raised the question of independence from British imperialism. In this sense, it would be wrong to think of them as men who fought for the freedom of the country. Their aspirations seldom went beyond those stated by E. W. Perera in 1907 in the “Twentieth Century Impressions of Ceylon”: “An eminently loyal people, deeply sensible of the benefit of British rule, the Ceylonese are aspiring to win the full measure of British citizenship. A freer constitution, flood relief works, abolition of the poll tax, systematic colonisation from the crowded western and southern districts to the restored tank regions, a larger educational vote and a wider field for the people of the country in the higher branches of the public service, are some of the reforms which have been eagerly awaited and are urgently needed, and which alone will crown the splendid monument of administration, which a Century of British statesmenship has raised in Ceylon”.
In contrast to the revolutionary nature of the movement for national independence which grew in the neighbouring continent of India, one peculiarity of the movement in Ceylon was that it was entirely reformist in character, and confined to the narrow walls of petition writing and going on deputations. No bourgeois reformist leader–from E. W. Perera to D. S. Senanayake and S. W. R. D. Bandaranaike – ever raised the demand for national independence. The cry of national independence was first raised in Ceylon by the left movement.
The first world war had very little impact on Ceylon, except for the excitement caused by the report of the arrival of the German gun boat, Emden, off the coast of Ceylon. The most important event of this period for Ceylon was the tragic racial riots of 1915. The immediate provocation for the riots was some religious ill-feeling between the Buddhists and the Coast Moors in the Kandy-Gampola area.
The dispute arose over the refusal of the Moors to permit a Buddhist perehera to go past their mosque. The Buddhists invoked the rights allegedly protected for them by the Kendyan Convention. The District Judge of Kandy, Dr. Paul E. Pieris, upheld the plea of the Buddhists. But his decision was reversed by the Supreme Court consisting of two English Judges. Thus, the fuse was ignited. But the British officials in Ceylon suspected the hand of the newly emerged Buddhist revival and temperance movement, which had earned the odium of being anti-government. They panicked and resorted to the most extreme measures. The Country was placed under martial law for three months, and brute force in the form of Punjabi soldiers was used against the Sinhalese. The number of those killed has never been estimated. Several suffered imprisonment for varying periods.
The Governor was recalled. But the sufferings of the Sinhalese had helped to deepen the anti-imperialist feelings of the people, as well as their hatred for the foreign rulers. This, in turn, spurred forward the movement for constitutional reform. But the immediate beneficiaries were some of the leaders, who had found themselves in jail during the riots. Before two decades could pass, they found themselves as political leaders of Ceylon–of course, as loyal servitors of the very imperialism that had sent them to jail!