During the months of the second monsoon (October–November) of 1766, Salomon Perera Semmerewire Goenetilleke from Siyane wrote a request letter to Godfried Leonard De Coste, disāva of the Colombo district at the time.1 In it, Salomon argued he had served his duties as a mohandiram during the insurgencies of the early 1760s by accompanying the armies that had travelled to the affected regions. He had been present during the fighting in, respectively, the villages of Gonawila and Balagala, the Kandyan territories, in the Hapitigam and Siyane kōralēs, and at the fortress of Sitawaka (situated on the border with Kandy). However, upon returning to his home village after two years of battle, he found himself homeless and left without any land grants (accommodessans) in return for his rendered services to the Company. Rather than asking De Coste to find a solution for him, Salomon had come up with an idea of his own. In the letter he proposed that he could be granted the lands of the former mudaliyār of Siyane, who had fled during the uprising. Alternatively, he suggested he could be granted the lands of one of the other “defectors” who had fought for Kandy and the “Sinhalese rebels” during the 1760–6 war.
Salomon’s letter showcases many of the tactics of negotiation described in the previous chapter: the utilisation of the request letter as a medium to contact the disāva’s office in Hulftsdorp; using linguistic tropes that would suit the colonisers’ expectations in appealing to his loyalty to the Company, specifically during times of duress and in contrast to other people in his social environment; and the negotiability of tenurial categories of land that was granted in return for the fulfilment of certain duties. As a mohandiram, Salomon was supposed to receive access to specifically sized plots of land for as long as he provided this service to the Company. However, his request to take over the landed property of the opponents of the colonial government shows the details of accommodessan grants were indeed negotiable.2 Particularly when one knew how to engage in such bargaining.
In the words of Rupesinghe, “[a]ny state, whether colonial or not, seeks to acquire a grip on its subjects and the resources under its jurisdiction.”4 Exactly how these polities gained said grip, and how firm this grip was, is subject to debate – particularly when it comes to the impact of (European) colonialism on local systems of rule.5 While findings and methodologies are diverse, and in some cases contrasting, it seems most historians of (South and Southeast) Asia agree that “the mechanisms of enforcement depended vitally on the support – willing or coerced, of the local community”, both in pre-colonial and colonial settings.6 The main area of debate, however, is on how much of it was coerced, and how much of it was down to indigenous agency and the influence of locally-anchored social mechanisms.7 Particularly in the domain of rights
Inspired by contemporary debates surrounding practices of global land grabbing today,8 and the legacy of historical cases of settler colonialism,9 some historians of empire have called for a broader analysis of colonial land policies using the land grabbing framework.10 The underlying premises here is that commercially-driven attempts by European empires to gain access to agricultural lands in the Global South was paired with the violent dispossession of said lands from the agrarian societies they had originally belonged to. This set in motion a process of land dispossession that has continued to this day. Applying this concept to historical case studies is a relatively new historiographical development, so it is too soon to either accept or discard this hypothesis.11 That said, one can easily see the attraction of using this model for case studies where complete displacement of indigenous – though not necessarily agrarian – communities is well documented, such as the Banda islands (specifically Banda Besar), a majority of the colonised islands in the Caribbean, and the territories of contemporary nation states like the United States of America, Australia, and New Zealand. More complex will be the locales where European colonisers never managed to completely dislodge local populations, laws, and institutions – including land rights.12 One such locale is, obviously, Sri Lanka.
There is no denying that the lands claimed as the Company’s property in Lanka were also primarily acquired through conquest, but the overarching system of land ownership seems to have been more complicated than that. While
Based on the land thombos of the Udugaha pattu in the Hapitigam kōralē, and the Meda pattu in the Siyane kōralē,16 this chapter will attempt to reconstruct this complex reality Lankan landowners had to face in a system partially based on colonial land grabbing, and partially on locally-anchored systems of land tenure. Hapitigam and Siyane are specifically interesting as these regions were seen by the Company as the frontier.17 Their distance from the colonial centres of power and their proximity to the border with Kandy made them difficult to govern for the Company, allowing for a larger level of manoeuvrability for the local population there. Despite of this, the colonial government claimed these lands as their own, and actively tried to enforce their land policies there. The resulting clash between colonial and local understandings of who really owned the land in these regions, will highlight the complexities of land management in an early modern colony. Additionally, I will be comparing the thombos of these regions with the registers of Colombo throughout this chapter. This will allow me to make distinctions between registration closer to and further away from the offices of the colonial bureaucracy to further complicate this narrative.
1 Classifying Property
As briefly mentioned in the introduction to this book, the eighteenth-century land thombos of the southwestern territories roughly divided the landed property of the registered families into two distinct types, in addition to several less common sub-categories. Lands (pangu) were primarily recorded as either sowing fields (zaailanden, kumburu), or as ‘gardens’ (tuinen, wattu). A third but rarer kind of category were the lands documented as ōwiti, referring to the meadowlands that could often be found along the borders of paddy-fields that were typically used by peasants to grow specific kinds of plants.18 Additionally, sowing fields could be specifically marked as temporary hēna lands, though the temporality of this type of property was often contested – as will be discussed later in this chapter. Finally, there were also the puran, which were fallowed plots of land.
Sowing fields were measured and documented in terms of sowing capacity according to the local standards of amunu and kuruni. One amunam equalled approximately forty kuruni, and came down to about two acres. The exact value of one amunam differed per region, however, as this measurement was based on the sowing capacity of the field, and was thus dependent on soil type, annual precipitation, seasonal changes, and the produce that was supposed to be sowed. Perhaps because of this inconsistency, the local system of measurement was supplemented by a measurement in the Dutch roede unit, carried out by the thombo committee’s land surveyors.19 Since the sowing fields were
For the gardens it was documented how many trees grew on the plot in question. The specific species that were recorded were the coconut, jackfruit, and areca nut trees, which were all also taxed in one way or another.20 The latter two were subjected to the watubadda ‘garden tax’, where either one-third or one-tenth (depending on the type of tree and fertility of the land) of the produce was taxed. Coconuts were never taxed – not for a lack of trying from the colonial government – but the toddy renters were allowed to tap the sap of one-third of the coconut trees for the production of arrack, palm wine, and jaggery.21
As tax rates were partially based on the ownership status of a plot of land, both the gardens and the sowing fields received specific sub-classifications to determine said status. The most desirable category, from the perspective of the landowners, was the aforementioned paravēni classification (categorised in the thombos as ninda, meaning untaxed lands). These “ancestral lands” had historically been granted to loyal families by the pre-colonial kings, and were both completely alienable (transferable, inheritable) and exempted from any kind of taxation. A specific subcategory of the paravēni were the service paravēni (dienstparavēni in the thombos, sevāparavēni in local vernacular), which were attached to a certain duty related to one’s caste or rank. This means that while these lands were also in theory alienable and exempted from taxation, the attached labour duty or service was supposed to be transferred with it. Under colonial rule this type of private property persisted, though the Dutch colonial government tried to limit the amount of lands recognised as such. Additionally, the exact definition of paravēni would remain contested throughout the colonial era (and it may have been in precolonial times as well).22
The other categories defining the ownership status of a plot of land in the thombos further highlights the complicated relationship between the ‘lord of the lands’ (the VOC) and the landholders.23 There were categories for plots of land that had once been cultivated by individuals in return for their rendered services, but had returned to the Company’s property because of either the death of the tenant (malapālu) or because the tenant’s duty had ended
While all of these classifications have pre-colonial origins, the Company behaved very differently than the local kings had done before them.24 For example, lands formally belonging to the kings were typically always cultivated in return for a share of the produce. There was no benefit to either king or peasant to leave the lands unused. This process would have been organised locally by the kōrāla chiefs, who would make the decisions and claim the share of the produce on the king’s behalf. While this practice will have continued well into the eighteenth century in regions like Hapitigam and Siyane, the Company was inherently much more anxious to lose such lands as they feared it would negatively impact the growth of the undomesticated cinnamon trees. Therefore any ‘illegal’ appropriation and cultivation of such lands that were discovered were either demolished, taken away, or – more commonly – taxed according to the most severe standard of ande, meaning half of the produce was claimed by the colonial government.25 It therefore became increasingly important for local landowners to either hide the lands they had illegitimately cultivated, or see if they could get them recognised according to any of the other aforementioned categories (preferably, paravēni).
An additional factor was the aforementioned change in demographics taking place during the eighteenth century (see chapter two), combined with a theoretically bilateral system of inheritance that could lead to serious fragmentation of existing plots of land.26 In simpler terms, the growing population
Looking at the categorisation of the, in total, 7,943 plots of lands (both fields and gardens) that were documented for both the Udugaha pattu (Hapitigam), and the Meda pattu (Siyane), the tension between locals trying to gain access to agrarian land (and to have them recorded (and recognised) as their property), and the Company trying to assert their sovereignty over the region becomes apparent (see Table 3). For both regions the two most common categories were indeed the paravēni on the one hand, and the Company’s lands on the other. An interesting difference is that for Hapitigam practically all of the paravēni were described as service paravēni, whereas in Siyane only about half of them were registered as such, with the other half being unspecified paravēni.
Plots of land in Udugaha, Hapitigam, and the Meda, Siyane, per category as found in the thombos
| Udugaha | Meda | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Category | N | % | Category | N | % |
| Service paravēni | 1671 | 55.4 | Service paravēni | 911 | 18.5 |
| Company land | 843 | 28.0 | Company land | 2108 | 42.8 |
| Malapālu | 360 | 11.9 | Malapālu | 385 | 7.8 |
| Nilapālu | 109 | 3.6 | Nilapālu | 414 | 8.4 |
| Paravēni | 5 | 0.2 | Paravēni | 1002 | 20.3 |
| Muttettu | 4 | 0.1 | Muttettu | 38 | 0.8 |
| Other/unknown | 23 | 0.8 | Other/unknown | 70 | 1.4 |
| Total | 3015 | 100 | Total | 4928 | 100 |
SOURCE: AUTHOR BASED ON DATABASE OF THE LAND THOMBOS OF UDUGAHA, HAPITIGAM (SLNA 1/3772, 3856) AND OF MEDA, SIYANE (SLNA 1/3776, 3861)
Additionally, the sheer number of cultivated plots of land that were marked as Company’s land (typically because the registered landowner could not prove otherwise) was much higher in Siyane. This is somewhat surprising, since Siyane was situated closer to Colombo (and with it the VOC’s bureaucratic apparatus), and one would expect the illegitimate clearing and cultivating of lands to be much more prominent in distant Hapitigam. Perhaps the illegitimately cultivated lands in Hapitigam were much harder to find. Or, alternatively, the Company was most actively policing the very regions they believed were the unlawful frontiers, as was also noted by Szonyi with regard
This dynamic is further illustrated by the lands that were initially marked as (service) paravēni before 1759 (in the old thombos), but saw this status retracted by the thombo commissioners between 1759 and 1771 because of a lack of evidence.32 Of the 1,676 plots of lands that were claimed to be paravēni by its proprietors in Udugaha (almost exclusively as service paravēni), forty-two
Interestingly, and in contrast to what the forecited colonial laws suggest, the plots that were rebranded as Company’s lands could usually be kept by its owners, but they were now susceptible to taxation (see Figure 5). In Udugaha, a grand total of 1,311 lands were registered to be eligible for taxation by the Company according to the “Company’s right” (“‘S Compagnies geregtigheid”). A large share (42%) of those lands were already documented before 1759, but the Company’s share had never been paid. Another half had been discovered between 1759 and 1761 (the majority as illegitimately cultivated Company’s land), and by 1770 the imposed obligation still had not been fulfilled. Again, the situation in Meda seems to have been very similar. Half of the 1,894 plots of lands that were found to be eligible for taxation had been known before ’59, but the owners had never paid their dues. Another forty-five percent had been discovered between 1759 and 1761, and by 1770 – just like in Hapitigam – were yet to see the Company’s share being paid. Strikingly, in Siyane, only five landowners were recorded to have actually paid the Company’s share of agricultural produce. In Hapitigam, none of them had. In contrast, the thombos in Colombo recorded 235 plots of land eligible for taxes, and those taxes had actually been paid for all but forty of the plots.36
Pie charts showing the amount of agricultural lands recorded to be eligible for taxation in the thombos, when they were discovered and whether they were fulfilled of the Udugaha pattu, Hapitigam, and the Meda pattu, Siyane, 1760–70.
SOURCE: AUTHOR BASED ON DATABASE OF THE LAND THOMBOS OF UDUGAHA, HAPITIGAM (SLNA 1/3772, 3856) AND OF MEDA, SIYANE (SLNA 1/3776, 3861)
Whether or not these taxes were actually collected, the underlying changes to the system are obvious. The colonial government was looking for much more direct and centralised ways to exert control over the hinterlands, and to take advantage of appropriated exploitative structures.37 In the process, they disrupted a tenurial regime that had operated relatively independently for generations, if not forever. While not necessarily through violence, though at times by threatening with it, one could argue the VOC applied land grabbing tactics to facilitate this process. Similarly, even though these agricultural lands were not used directly to grow commercialised commodity products (at least not by the Company), the revenue produced from farming out the right to collect this agricultural produce was a lucrative business (see chapter three).
Interestingly, as noted by Dewasiri, these changes to the system at the same time opened the door to a broad class of people who were willing and able to navigate this transition.38 Taking advantage of the fact that many of the appropriated categories of land tenure were contested and malleable during this period in time, these actors approached the colonial government in an effort to gain, secure, or enlarge their landed property. Rather than to resort to slash-and-burn agriculture against the wishes of the Company, as members of the peasantry had done for decades, they attempted to get land appointed to them through ways legitimised by the VOC. An important aspect of opting for this route was the fact that lands appointed this way would be recognised on paper, and subsequently be secured not just for the person it was granted to, but for the following generations as well. For some this was simply a way to continue their agrarian way of life without the meddling of a state-like entity, for example, by securing their property with the paravēni status. For others,
2 Access to Company’s Land I: Taxes and Labour
In 1768, the mahavidāne of the Alutkuru kōralē named Don Philip Wickremesinge joined a group of high-ranking colonial officials – including governor Falck and the disāva of Colombo – for a visitation of the Dunagaha pattu (eighteen kilometres east of Negombo fortress). Along the way Falck had allegedly pointed the fellowship’s attention to some puran (fallow) lands that were overgrown and unused, and had asked why no one was cultivating those lands.39 When no one had a ready answer, Don Philip, possibly sensing a unique opportunity, proposed to the governor that he would take it upon himself to clear and cultivate these puran. The very same day he was granted a sannas ola signed by the disāva, recognising the land as Don Philip’s “ottu paravēni” on the condition that all the cinnamon trees growing there would be left untouched.40
It seems Don Philip (who would later be promoted to the rank of mudaliyār) made good use of the fact that his position as intermediary brought him face-to-face with one of the most powerful people on the island at the time. Not only did he acquire a new plot of land, the paravēni status secured the right to this land not only for himself, but also for his descendants. The fact that he would pay ottu (one-tenth of the produce) to the Company over a previously overgrown plot of arable land made it a clear quid pro quo situation. Yet, there is also something puzzling about Don Philip’s story, specifically regarding this plot being categorised as “ottu paravēni” – an ‘ancestral’, alienable land that was bound by ottu taxation. Most obviously, the classification itself was a contradiction, because paravēni were normally always tax-free. Moreover, the plot was hardly ‘ancestral’ to Don Philip, as he had quite literally stumbled upon it the same day it was granted to him.
While thombo keepers often denied claims of paravēni rights by tenants, many questionable entries – like the one of Don Philip – made it as paravēni into the thombos. It is difficult to discern why the plots of land of some were successfully recognised as ancestral lands, while others were not. Dewasiri has argued that these inconsistencies were caused by the fact that “from the point of view of the peasant, following a standard and systematic way of defining and naming the holdings would have been a highly frustrating exercise.”41 They
Rupesinghe has argued there was a “tension between practical realities at a grassroots level and perceived realities at a higher level of government” in how the colony was governed.42 Specifically related to the thombos, she argued that the thombo registration practice itself was “flexible on the ground”, and identified the Landraad of Galle to have been a space where such tensions were met with “fluidity”.43 As such, maintaining a level of ambiguity in the classification of one’s landed property when interacting with colonial officials could be advantageous for local landowners. Especially if it could lead to lands being registered as paravēni lands even if they were not.
The significant amount of lands that can be found as wrongfully categorised as paravēni according to the thombo committee (or by indigenous commissioners) over the years highlights how often people attempted to secure their property this way (and to exempt it from taxation).44 Perhaps, rather than showcasing a stark contrast between indigenous and colonial realities, like Dewasiri proposed, the (categories in) the thombos illustrate how local and colonial stakeholders were negotiating paravēni rights as a proxy for private landowning in the appropriated bhupati system during a time of increased colonial presence in the hinterlands. Rather than a dichotomy, the thombos are a testimony of pragmatism, opportunism, and lack of consistent policy.
This dynamicity of the tenurial systems lies hidden in the shadow of the seemingly rigid and systemic classification system of the thombos, and the tension between land being categorised as either Company’s land or as paravēni (as described at the beginning of the chapter).45 For every category, dozens of sub-classifications, exceptions, and mutations (like Don Philip’s newfound property) can be found.46 In addition, in the descriptions of the registered plots of land an incredibly wide range of types of evidence have been documented which people utilised to have their property (and its classification) recognised (though not always successfully).
Contrary to what one might expect, the records produced by the colonial government were not necessarily held in higher regard than locally produced evidence by colonial officials and offices, or at least not in the cases held before the Landraad of Colombo.50 Additionally, in some cases this line between ‘locally-produced’ and ‘colonially-produced’ records, classifications, and traditions could get blurry. A great example of this blurriness can be found in the lands granted in return for provided services or labour duties – the aforementioned service paravēni and accommodessan grants. What the exact distinction was between the two has led to debate amongst historians. Kotelawele argued that the paravēni were tied to (lower) caste duties, whereas the accommodessan grants were restricted to higher officials.51 Dewasiri corrected this proposed distinction by showing that lower officials (like lascarins) also received accommodessan grants (also see Table 4 below).52 Additionally, according to Kotelawele service paravēni – like all other paravēni – would have been fully inheritable (as long as the service which it compensated was also inherited), and in contrast accommodessan grants were officially not. Dewasiri’s work shows, however, that accommodessans were actually very frequently inherited in practice, in the same way paravēni were.
Types of services for which accommodessans were granted, circa 1750
| Service for which land is granted | No. of lands granted |
|---|---|
| Nainde (lower sub-caste group performing labour for higher-ranked members of their caste) | 19 |
| Lascarin | 15 |
| ‘Heere dienst’ (rājakāriya) | 8 |
| Mayorāl (village chiefs) | 6 |
| Āchāri (goldsmiths, blacksmiths, and carpenters) | 5 (3–1–1) |
| Zaaijmeester (‘sowing master’, overseer of the sowing fields) | 2 |
| Steenslijper (mason, potentially also related to the āchāri caste) | 2 |
| Potter (badähala) | 1 |
| Panividakārayā (messengers, envoys) | 1 |
| Schoolmaster | 1 |
| Mannannas (meaning unknown to the author) | 1 |
| Geneesmeester (healer, perhaps berava caste) | 1 |
| Radā (caste of washers) | 1 |
| Kōrāla (district chief, high official) | 1 |
| Jagereros (hakuru, caste known for the production of jaggery) | 1 |
| Not specified | 1 |
| Total | 66 |
SOURCE: SLNA 1/2827, ‘REGISTER OF ACCOMMODESSANS BETWEEN “PAS NAKLEGAM” AND THE “PANNEBAKKERY”. CIRCA 1750.’
Soenikitta’s case, and others similar to it,58 corroborate with, and extend Dewasiri’s argument that, in practice, there was hardly any difference between the two categories of service land ownership at all.59 According to him, the only clear distinction between the two categories lies in the question who ended up cultivating the land. Where the owners of service paravēni seem to have mostly been people who were cultivators themselves, and were thus responsible for the cultivation of these lands, Dewasiri found accommodessan owners often had others cultivate it for them. The paravēni would fit in the old paradigm of societal organisation where everyone would have been an agriculturalist spending most of their time farming the land, and only fulfilled caste-bound duties during periods of time the fields did not need tending to. The accommodessan grants were interpreted by Dewasiri as a symptom of a changing system under (Dutch) colonialism, where landowners used the profits from selling their produce to take on wage labourers to do the work for them, and in
As can be deduced from Table 4, the most common duties for which accommodessans were granted were indeed services to the Company, albeit through the system of indirect rule that was managed by indigenous chiefs – like the nainde and lascarin services, and labour services categorised as rājakāriya duties. However, at least a few were granted based on the more ‘traditional’ caste services, which were not directly related to labour duties performed for the VOC. More importantly, the caste groups that would have received these lands (the āchāri, badähala, radā, and hakuru) were exactly the kind of communities that – in accordance with Dewasiri’s description of the precolonial distribution of land and labour – would have performed these duties part-time, while spending most time on the fields.
All in all, it seems that, historically, service paravēni were mostly related to locally-organised caste labour relations, while accommodessans were granted directly by colonial governments (though the latter also had a pre-colonial analogue in the divel land grants). However, over the centuries – remembering accommodessan is a Portuguese word – local and colonial perceptions and categorisation of labour, land, and labour-provided-for-land got mixed up, and were used haphazardly and interchangeably on the ground level. Both were used by Company and local actors when negotiating such constructs. Both were in principle untaxed – though as we have seen above (and will see more of later) that was negotiable – and in most cases de facto alienable as long as the attached service would be continued by whomever bought, inherited, or was gifted this land.
People from all echelons of Sri Lanka’s colonial society could utilise their performed services for the Company as a tool in their negotiations for additional land. For the most powerful this could even mean challenging the VOC’s sovereignty and political power by claiming ownership over entire “accommodessan villages”.61 For the minor headmen and officials – like Don Philip – it was a means to gain influence and wealth. For the lower strata, however, it could be a matter of life or death, or at least that is how they made it seem in
3 Access to Company’s Land II: the Promise of Plantations
From the earliest decades of colonial rule – and before – peasants could directly address the government’s bureaucracy through the land requests that were very briefly touched upon in the previous chapter. In these requests, the appealing party would describe a plot of arable but unused land, accompanied by a general description of its size and current status, and a proposition with regard to the produce that could be grown on it and which share of said produce would be given to the government in return for granting the request. However, until the eighteenth century only a select group of individuals would use this medium to acquire land, and typically only land situated relatively close to governmental centres of power. People in the distant hinterlands would have simply disregarded the Company’s (and perhaps the pre-colonial king’s) bhupati claim, as the thombos from Hapitigam and Siyane have also showcased. In the second half of the eighteenth century this dynamic changed, not just because of the growing encroachment of the hinterlands by the Company, but also as a consequence of inconsistent land policies applied by the VOC’s government in Lanka (see chapter two). Especially when it comes to whether the practice of hēna was allowed, and if so, how it was regulated.
Under the leadership of change-oriented governors like Van Imhoff and Van Gollenesse, access to the Company’s land was opened up, and the practice of hēna was left unhampered, if not encouraged. However, only a few regimes later, during the governance of more restrictive rulers like Loten and Schreuder, there was a clampdown on hēna. In fact, Schreuder even tried to completely abolish the practice. By the end of the 1760s, slash-and-burn activities were only allowed if the applicant had the plot registered by a local chief,
An era of relative calm and continuity directly followed the end of the Kandyan war, during the long reign of Falck, from 1765 to 1785.65 It was during this time that Van Imhoff’s vision of Sri Lanka as an agriculturally-oriented colony started to really take shape. However, attributing this transition to Falck (or Van Imhoff) would ignore the impact local planters had who had continuously urged the colonial government to allow them to work the lands that had been restricted for so long. In the Council Minutes of 17 October 1768, it was reported that both the disāva and the governor had received countless requests from the inhabitants of the Colombo disāvany to clear and cultivate arable land in the region in return for ottu and even ande tax rates.66 Due to this insistence from the local peasantry, the disāva had proposed a “concept instruction” for a group of commissioners to systematically check such requested lands, and grant them once clearance was given by the governor.67 Similarly, the process of requesting land to be made available for hēna was simplified, which could now be more easily requested by directly addressing the disāva, who kept lists of such granted plots for every administrative year.68 These changes in policy were largely provoked by the continuous stream of requests filed by local agents.
One of the most noteworthy changes in land policy that was initiated under Falck’s governance, at least for its symbolism, was the alleviation of the VOC’s monopoly on the production of cinnamon.69 His first experiments with the
All in all, towards the end of the eighteenth century a unique window of opportunity opened where the Company quite suddenly and rather radically started to allow local farmers and planters to take hold of the land they had previously so painstakingly tried to protect and isolate. The beneficiaries of these changes to the system, as it would turn out, were mostly members of what one could consider as the middle class of that time – somewhat lower officials within the system of indirect rule, high-caste landowners, and economically diversified groups of mobile merchants (like the chettiars) (see Table 5).72 Next to them there were also some of the more elite members of the colonial society, such as mudaliyārs and kōrāla chiefs. In short, all individuals who would have known how to communicate with the VOC, and who could afford to invest labour into the newly acquired lands. However, not all of the applicants were elites or individuals well-embedded within the colonial administrative system. Some individuals from lower classes, castes, and ranks also tried – and were sometimes successful – to gain access to the Company’s lands.
Social categories of land applicants who had requested lands between 1766 and 1767
| Standardised categorisation applicant(s) | Number of applicants |
|---|---|
| Mohandiram | 8 |
| Mudaliyār | 4 |
| Appuhamy | 3 |
| Fisherman (probably karāva) | 2 |
| Lascarin | 2 |
| Vidāne | 2 |
| Appuhamy saparamādu | 1 |
| Appuhamy vidāne | 1 |
| Bookkeeper | 1 |
| Chettiar | 1 |
| Cinnamon peeler (salāgama) | 1 |
| Mahamudaliyār | 1 |
| (former) Mudaliyār & kōrāla | 1 |
| Oarsman | 1 |
| Scribe | 1 |
| Unknown/unspecified | 6 |
| Total | 36 |
SOURCE: SLNA 1/3673, FIRST TWO LISTS OF LAND REQUESTS IN: ‘TRANSLATIONS OF SINHALESE OLA REPORTS ON VARIOUS TYPES OF LAND IN THE COLOMBO DESSAVONY. COMPILED AT HULFTSDORP. 1776 JULY 13–1787 April 27’
Many of the requests that flooded into the colonial offices in the latter half of the eighteenth century had been triggered by a sense of opportunism from the requestors. As was mentioned before, several of them tried to claim the lands of those that had deserted or rebelled during the war with Kandy, or plots that had been abandoned for other reasons during the conflict. Additionally, some even requested plots of lands they had seemingly never even visited themselves. For example, a man who self-identified as a chettiar had
These land requests remind us of the fact that while colonial land policy might have opened up significantly by the end of the century, the VOC was still trying to limit the loss of cinnamon-producing plots. For example, nearly all of the granted requests from the sample were classified as ‘low lands’ which were primarily suitable for paddy fields. Cinnamon rarely ever grew on such wet, marshy lands, thus there was little worry that cinnamon would be lost when such plots were cleared of its vegetation. This was further highlighted by the fact that two of these granted plots had not even been investigated because the visitation committee had not been able to find them, yet they were granted. Applicants would have been aware of the fact that the presence of cinnamon trees on the plot they requested would have instantly resulted in their request being denied. Some even tried to mislead the visitation committees, for example by pointing them towards the wrong plot of land.74 Cases such as these highlight that owning land in the colonised regions of Lanka continued to be a game of cat and mouse, and that actors trying to work the system were willing to go the extra mile to get what they were looking for.75
The thombos – when actively being juxtaposed to other registers, lists, and letters – offer us a glimpse of these local-colonial interactions, and the underlying systems that structured them. During the time of their creation, a European-imperial government was claiming sovereignty over lands that had historically been known as the ratmahara of the bhupati. To do so, the VOC based this sovereignty on the same principle (as the Portuguese had done before them) using many of the same locally-anchored mechanisms and concepts in an effort to exploit existing systems of taxation and bonded labour. However, for most peasant communities living beyond the boundaries of the port cities’ suburbs, this appropriation of the bhupati institution would have hardly affected them. For many, this changed when land policy reforms and demographic shifts had forcefully led to much more direct interactions with the colonial government, as we have seen in this chapter. These interactions revealed that the aforementioned locally-anchored mechanisms and concepts that were appropriated by the Company could be interpreted in many different ways, which could lead to both resistance (people illegitimately clearing
[The Indian Ocean World in the eighteenth century] was overwhelmingly a world of peasants, of tenant farmers and land owners: crop and harvest were the vital matters of this world and anything else was superstructure, the result of accumulation and of unnatural diversion towards the towns. Peasants and crops, in other words food supplied and the size of the population, silently determined the destiny of the age. In both the long and the short term, agricultural life was all-important. Could it support the burden of increasing population and the luxury of the urban civilization so dazzling that it has blinded us to other things? For each succeeding generation this was the pressing problem of every day. Beside it, the rest seems to dwindle into insignificance.79
SLNA 1/3673: ‘Translations of Sinhalese ola reports on various types of land in the Colombo dessavony. Compiled at Hulftsdorp. 1776 July 13–1787 April 27,’ request letter of Salomon Perera Semmerewire Goenetilleke to Godfried Leonard De Coste. Note that the description in Jurriaanse’s inventory marks the dates incorrectly, as the first two bundled requests hail from 1766, 1767 and 1768 (so well before 1776).
Dewasiri, The Adaptable Peasant, 125–31; Nadeera Rupesinghe, “Defining Land Rights in Dutch Sri Lanka,” Portuguese Journal of Social Science 16, no. 2 (2017): 143–62.
Dewasiri, The Adaptable Peasant, 102–4; M. U. De Silva, “Land Tenure, Caste System and the Rājakāriya under Foreign Rule: A Review of Change in Sri Lanka under Western Powers, 1597–1832,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Sri Lanka 37 (1993): 1–57.
Rupesinghe, “Defining Land Rights,” 143; Rupesinghe, Lawmaking in Dutch Sri Lanka, 177; also see: Lauren Benton, A Search for Sovereignty: Law and Geography in European Empires, 1400–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).
E.g., Bayly, Empire and Information; Scott, Seeing Like a State; Serrão, “Property, Land and Territory”; Sumit Guha, “Property Rights, Social Structure and Rural Society in Comparative Perspective: Evidence from Historic South Asia,” International Journal of South Asian Studies 5 (2013): 13–22; Gagan Sood, “Sovereign Justice in Precolonial Maritime Asia: The Case of the Mayor’s Court of Bombay, 1726–1798,” Itinerario 37, no. 2 (2013): 46–72.
Guha, “Evidence from Historic South Asia,” 19.
In many ways similar to the debates on indigenous intermediaries and modes of resistance against state-like polities, as presented in chapters three and four respectively. Obviously, there are similar debates with regard to forced labour systems – such as caste and corvée labour – as the next chapter will highlight.
Saturnino Borras, Ruth Hall, Ian Scoones, Ben White, and Wendy Wolford, “Towards a Better Understanding of Global Land Grabbing: An Editorial Introduction,” The Journal of Peasant Studies 38, no. 2 (2011): 209–16.
Michael Ekers, “Land Grabbing on the Edge of Empire: The Longue Durée of Fee-Simple Forest Lands and Indigenous Resistance in British Columbia,” The Journal of Peasant Studies 50, no. 7 (2023): 2799–828.
See, for example, this project funded by the Dutch Research Council: Pepijn Brandon (PI), “Land Grabbing Empire: State Strategies for Large Scale Land Transfers in Dutch Expansion (16th-18th centuries),” (2022–7, https://iisg.amsterdam/en/blog/land-grabbing-empire-state-strategy-and-large-scale-land-transfers-dutch-expansion-16th-18th [last consulted on 14 August 2024]).
An important exception being, yet with the distinction that it follows a localised, rather than a global perspective: Eric Meyer, “From Landgrabbing to Landhunger: High Land Appropriation in the Plantation Areas of Sri Lanka During the British Period,” Modern Asian Studies 26, no. 2 (1992): 321–61.
Lauren Benton, Law and Colonial Cultures: Legal Regimes in World History, 1400–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Herzog, “Colonial Law and ‘Native Customs’”; Yannakakis, Since Time Immemorial; Rupesinghe, Dutch Lawmaking in Sri Lanka.
Dewasiri, The Adaptable Peasant, 131–6; Rupesinghe, “Defining Land Rights,” 153–4.
Rupesinghe, Lawmaking in Dutch Sri Lanka, 204–5.
Dewasiri, The Adaptable Peasant, 174–9; Meyer, “From Landgrabbing to Landhunger,” 360–1.
Database compiled from SLNA 1/3688, 3690, 3736, 3772, 3776, 3816, 3819, 3856, 3860, and 3861, by Albert van den Belt and Sujeewa Bandara, under the supervision of Jan Kok, supported by Ton van Raaij, and with funding from the Dutch Research Council (NWO)’s ‘Spinoza grant’ (which was granted to Jan Luiten van Zanden), and from the Raboud Institute for Culture and History (RICH, formerly known as HLCS). Data available upon request.
Kok, Bulten, and De Leede, “Persecuted or Permitted,” 338–9.
These lands were subjected to lower taxes than most other lands because of the infertile nature of such meadowlands, see: Dewasiri, The Adaptable Peasant, 110; also see: Codrington, Ancient Land Tenure, 7.
For reference, one Rijnlandse roede equals about 14.19 square metres by today’s standards.
Which is a limiting factor to agrarian historians interested in consumption and land productivity, as crucial crops and products like mango, rambutan, plantain, and others are missing from these records.
Rupesinghe, “Strange Cooperation,” 23–6.
Rupesinghe, Lawmaking in Dutch Sri Lanka, 195–7.
Dewasiri, The Adaptable Peasant, 110–3.
Ibid., 131–6.
SLNA 1/3672, ‘Translations of Sinhalese ola reports by native land commissioners on the lands and gardens cultivated in the Colombo dessavony, addressed to the dessave. 1773 – 1775.’
In one extreme case held in front of the Landraad between 1774 and 1776, at least fourteen relatives were all said to have a share in the family’s land. SLNA 1/4789, fol. 168–84, Walgampollege Maria Dias v. Oesenia Fernando, Walgampollege Siripira, and Joean Hittige Anna [1774–6].
Dewasiri, The Adaptable Peasant, 33–6.
For example, in a mandate sent to all headmen of the Colombo, Galle and Matara districts, the Company warned the chiefs that they had received reports of undocumented hēna agriculture destroying potentially cinnamon-bearing lands. They reminded the chiefs hēna was only allowed for lands requested and cleared for this purpose. If illegal hēna cultivation was found to be taking place in a chief ’s region, they would be severely punished, SLNA 1/2466, fol. 141–2.
See SLNA 1/3670, which was cited in the previous chapter.
Szonyi, The Art of Being Governed, 32–3.
Database of the land thombos of Udugaha, Hapitigam and Meda Siyane; SLNA 1/2466, fol. 23–24, 108–110, 149. Almost all of the of the plots of land found without owners in the Siyane and Hapitigam were unclaimed hēna lands.
Landholders could prove ownership through deeds or olas containing a detailed genealogy of the lands, or through documents proving the proprietors maintained this land in return for performed services or duties. If this evidence was deemed insufficient by the commissioners, this was recorded in the thombo as “registered as Company’s land due to lack of evidence.”
Respectively, 703 out of the 1,676 registered paravēni plots, and 83 out of the 473 lands registered as malapālu, nilapālu, or muttettu.
For the paravēni, 847 out of 1,913, and for the plots marked as malapālu, nilapālu, or muttettu 81 out of 837.
Database of the 1766–71 series of the Colombo land thombos (SLNA 1/3802, vol. I & II), compiled by Coen Stikkelbroek who was appointed as a research assistant through funding of the N. W. Posthumus Institute PhD Grant (March 2021). Data available upon request.
Database of the Colombo Four Gravets thombos, the landowners of the remaining 195 plots land had either partly (N=80) or completely (N=115) paid their taxes. Also note the much lower number of agricultural lands directly surrounding the more urbanised areas around Colombo.
Rupesinghe, “Defining Land Rights,” 151–3.
Dewasiri, The Adaptable Peasant, 81–4.
SLNA 1/3643, fol. 51–2.
Ibid., fol. 55.
Dewasiri, The Adaptable Peasant, 111.
Rupesinghe, “Defining Land Rights,” 148.
Ibid., 157–8.
In addition to the analysis of the thombos from Hapitigam and Siyane presented above, also see SLNA 1/3658 for several examples of commissioners finding illegitimate or unproven paravēni lands.
Dewasiri, The Adaptable Peasant, 128–31.
Ibid., 110–1.
E.g. SLNA 1/3772, 3776, 3856, and 3861.
Officially, the first (the giftebrieven) was supposed to replace the latter (sannas olas), but the colonial government continued to use both instruments to officially grant and recognise land to members of the populace. See: Lyna and Bulten, “Material Pluralism”. Also note that in pre-colonial times, sannas deeds were actually imprinted on copper plates, but at some point during colonial rule it was changed to palm leaf. The French in India did continue to use copper plates, as was the regional practice, which will be briefly touched upon in chapter seven.
See, for example, the case of Jana Poetti v. Simon Gomis Nalletambij, where Jana (the plaintiff) had received a new copy for his lost deed, and Simon (the defendant) protested, stating it was his land instead – with the latter showing an ola to proof it, SLNA 1/4789, fol. 9–28.
Also see: Bulten, ‘Colonial Recognition?’
D. A. Kotelawele, “Problems and Policies,” 420.
Dewasiri, The Adaptable Peasant, 127–8; also see: SLNA 1/2466, fol. 166–8.
E.g., Hovy, Ceylonees Plakkaatboek, 496–7, in this 1744 statute, the VOC warned people that having one’s accommodessans falsely recorded as ‘inheritance paravēni’ (erfparavenie) would result in them being arrested and be condemned to three years of hard labour, as this had allegedly happened on a great scale.
A patangatim was an indigenous chief of the karāva caste, similar in function to a mohandiram. Known as pattangatijn in Dutch.
SLNA 1/2466, fol. 88–90, the chiefs claimed they were already responsible for the construction of ambalamas, bridges, and decorative arches. Additionally they had to get people to sweep the roads and decorate them with palm leaves in case of a visitation. Lastly, they had to supply visiting committees with pingo and, once a year, they had to get low caste labourers to drag timber and to perform other heavy labour duties.
Two of the lands were identified as former ratmahara lands, but interestingly the other plots had previously been owned by a mayorāl – some of which as (‘coolie’) paravēni. Why these lands were taken from the mayorāl is not specified, perhaps he had died and the disāva had reclaimed those lands for the Company.
SLNA 1/2466, fol. 89: “Vermogende dus, hij Hackoerogoe Soeniritta, zo lange en voorm:[elde] dienst verrigt, de gezegde thuijnen en zaaijvelden nevens zijn kinderen, en kinds-kinderen, als een parvenium possideeren.”
Another example can be found in SLNA 1/2827, the forecited register of accommodessans, fol. 14, v.: in one entry it was recorded that a lascarin had become too old to fulfil his duties. Despite his inability to continue providing his services, he was allowed to keep the land granted to him as accommodessan. Moreover, there was no mentioning whatsoever of those lands having to be returned to the Company if and when he died, nor was there anything on potential male heirs that could take over. Thus in practice, in all but its name this can be considered as his paravēni property.
Dewasiri, The Adaptable Peasant, 128–31.
Ibid., 179–83.
Obviously, the Company was not pleased with entire villages being treated as accommodessan grants. In an article within a long list of statutes that was sent to Matara in the late 1760s, the Company had it known that it was no longer possible to acquire villages as accommodessans, as this would from then on be forbidden, SLNA 1/2466, fol. 169–70.
Several petitions have been found where peasants requested additional accommodessan grants in return for their (caste-related) services because they claimed they could not feed themselves or their children, see, e.g., SLNA 1/2466, fol. 33–4, 147–9.
SLNA 1/2466, fol. 180–2. Also see: Kotelawele, “Agrarian Policies,” 17.
Kotelawele, “Agrarian Policies.”
Schrikker, Expansion and Reform, chap. 3.
SLNA 1/155, minutes of 17 October 1768.
Ibid., because the “reports of the natives” could never be “confidently taken into account”, the commission would consist of both indigenous and European officials. Specifically, the lieutenant-disāva or another member of the Landraad, a land surveyor, two appuhamy saparamādus, and two salāgama would perform the visitations.
As can be deduced from a list of requested hēna lands, and a separate list of granted hēna lands for the year 1780, when a grand total of 1,622 hēna requests were granted for the Colombo disāvany alone, see: SLNA 1/3643, fol. 101–5, 137.
Schrikker, Expansion and Reform, 53–4.
SLNA 1/2466, fol. 85–7.
Schrikker, Expansion and Reform, 55; Dewasiri, The Adaptable Peasant, 81–4.
SLNA 1/3673 consists of several bundles of the original land requests, the visitation reports, and the verdicts by the governor. The first two collections within the volume regard requests that were collected over 1766 and 1767, so one or two years before the official ratification of the new land request policy by the Council. A total of forty-nine requested plots of land, by thirty-six different requestors, were found in the first two lists and recorded in a small database. This data is available upon request.
Database of SLNA 1/3673.
Ibid., the plot of land, requested by an appuhamy (who would have known how visitations worked), was found to be clear of cinnamon by the committee at first. However, the committee later figured out that they had been deceived and shown the wrong plot. When they found the actual piece of land, cinnamon was found to grow there and thus the request was denied. Whether the applicant in question faced additional punishment is not specified in the report.
Szonyi, The Art of Being Governed, 8.
Also see: David Ludden, An Agrarian History of South Asia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
Wickramasinghe, Sri Lanka in the Modern Age, xi; Wickramasinghe, Metallic Modern, 8, 65.
Pearson, Indian Ocean, 45.
Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II vol. 3 (London: Collins, 1972), 1241.