The Adaptable Peasant: Agrarian Society in Western Sri Lanka Under Dutch Rule, 1740-1800 (Tanap Monographs on the History of Asian-European Interaction)

327 Pages·2007·4.49 MB·English

by  Nirmal Ranjith Dewasiri

The Adaptable Peasant
TAMO-9-dewasiri.indd i 22-10-2007 11:28:13
TANAP Monographs
on the History of
Asian-European Interaction
Edited by
Leonard Blussé and Cynthia Viallé
VOLUME 9
TAMO-9-dewasiri.indd ii 22-10-2007 11:28:13
The Adaptable Peasant
Agrarian Society in Western Sri Lanka under
Dutch Rule, 1740-1800
By
Nirmal Ranjith Dewasiri
LEIDEN • BOSTON
2008
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The TANAP programme is funded by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research
(NWO).
This book is printed on acid-free paper.
A C.I.P. record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.
ISSN 1871-6938
ISBN 978 90 04 16508 3
Copyright 2008 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands.
Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Hotei Publishing,
IDC Publishers, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers and VSP.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in
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Fees are subject to change.
printed in the netherlands
TAMO-9-dewasiri.indd iv 22-10-2007 11:28:13
v
Dedicated to my Mother and Father
vi
BLANCO
vii
SERIES EDITOR’S FOREWORD
Probably nowhere in the world have such profound changes in historio-
graphy been occurring as in the nation states of Monsoon Asia that gained
independence after the conclusion of the Pacific War in 1945. These tra-
ditionally outward-looking countries on the rims of the Indian Ocean
and the Eastern Seas have been interacting with each other through
maritime transport and trade for more than two millennia, but the exi-
gencies of modern nation-building have tended to produce state-centred
historical narratives that emphasise a distinctive heritage and foster
cultural pride and identity on the basis of such heroic themes as anti-colo-
nial resistance. No one will deny the need for and utility of such ‘nation-
building’ agendas, but an inward-directed national historiography does
not necessarily prepare one’s citizens for our present age of regional co-
operation and globalisation.
In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the coastal societies of
Monsoon Asia witnessed the entry of European traders, the emergence of
global maritime trading networks, and the laying of the foundations of
colonial empires that reached their apogees in the nineteenth and twen-
tieth centuries. The difficulties of studying this pre-colonial and early
colonial past should not be underestimated. Local sources are often rare
because of wars and the frequent changes of both indigenous and colonial
regimes. The hot and humid tropical climate is also unkind to the preser-
vation of manuscripts. The mass of western-language data preserved in
the archives of the former East India Companies and those of the Spanish
and Portuguese empires in Asia often have an undeniably Europe-centred
character and bias. Thus we face not only a highly imbalanced supply of
source material, but also the very complex problem of how to decode the
hidden agendas that often colour these primary materials.
Over the past fifty years there has been a pronounced effort in academ-
ic circles in North America, Australia and the former European colonial
nations to ‘decolonize’ historical writing on Asian-European interaction,
albeit for reasons totally different from those in their Asian counterparts.
Increasingly doubt has been cast on such longstanding paradigms as the
superiority of the dynamic West over static Asian societies. Historians of
international trade such as the late Holden Furber, whose description of
this period as ‘The Age of Partnership’ inspired the name of the TANAP
programme, have taken an interest in the various ways and means by
which Asian-European interaction began in various kinds of competition,
rivalry, collaboration, diplomacy, and military confrontation. This
viii SERIES EDITOR’S FOREWORD
approach has forced historians to return to the archival sources and the
places where these events unfolded with the result that new frontiers of
research have opened up in which close partnerships between Asian and
European historians, with their specific cultural tool kits and linguistic
backgrounds, are now starting to bear fruit.
In anticipation of the four hundredth anniversary of the establishment
of the Dutch East India Company in 1602, members of the History
Department of Leiden University proposed the establishment of an inter-
national research programme aimed at training a new generation of Asian
historians of Asian-European interaction in the early modern period. It
was taken for granted that any such drive towards international educa-
tional co-operation should be carried out in carefully planned collabora-
tion with the National Archives in The Hague, the Arsip Nasional of the
Republic of Indonesia in Jakarta, and the archives of Cape Town (South
Africa), Colombo (Sri Lanka), and Chennai (India), which together hold
several kilometres of archival records from the former Verenigde Oost-
indische Compagnie. The TANAP—Towards a New Age of Partnership
—educational and archival preservation programme was started in 2000
thanks to generous grants from the Dutch Ministry of Education, Culture
and Science, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Netherlands Organi-
zation for Scientific Research (NWO), the Netherlands Foundation for
the Advancement of Tropical Research (WOTRO), the Netherlands
UNESCO Commission, and Leiden University. Twelve universities in
Asia sent some thirty young lecturers to Leiden during 2001-2003. Under
the auspices of the Research Institute for Asian-African and Amerindian
Studies (CNWS), these historians participated in an advanced master’s
programme that included intensive courses on historiography, palaeo-
graphy, and the old Dutch written language.
With additional funding from several Asian foundations, in 2002
seventeen of the TANAP graduates from Sri Lanka, India, Singapore,
Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam, China, Taiwan, Japan, South Africa, and
the Netherlands began working towards a Ph.D. degree at Leiden. Three
others went on to pursue their doctorates at universities elsewhere in the
world. The TANAP Monographs on the History of Asian-European Inter-
action, which include two studies on early modern South African society,
are the offspring of their doctoral theses defended at Leiden.
Leonard Blussé, Leiden University
ix
CONTENTS
Acknowledgements xv
Notes to the reader xviii
Glossary xix
Maps xxiii
Prologue 1
Introduction 3
Historical setting 4
Historiography 10
Conceptualising the ‘peasant’ in the context of the colonial
hegemony 13
Some methodological issues 15
Sources 19
Organisation of chapters 22
Chapter One: The World of the Peasant 25
Everyday life of the peasant 25
Links with the outside world 29
The world of the peasant and external forces 32
Demographic patterns 33
The horizons of the peasant’s life 42
Gama: What’s in a name? 43
The boundaries and the geographical sense of gama 47
The internal setting of the village 49
1. The internal setting of Kahambilihena 53
2. The va¯sagama group and the internal setting of gama 55
3. Caste in the internal setting of the gama 57
Some concluding remarks 57
Chapter Two: The System of Production and Its Changes 59
Level of rice production 59
Three systems of production 62
Changing patterns of land utilisation in the peasant production 63
1. Company policy towards chena cultivation 65
2. The changing role of gardens 67
Coconut, areca nut, and jak trees as garden crops 70
The market for garden crops 76