By

Gananath Obeyesekere

In an earlier article written in 2007 I wrote a protest regarding the huge allocation of land in Uva-Vellassa to a foreign company Booker Tate, lands that should have been given to residents of the area for cultivation purposes.

Owing to public protests this land allocation project had to be abandoned. I now gather a cabinet paper will hand over 62,500 acres to Gazelle Ventures of Singapore, to be ceremonially presented by the President, Maitripala Sirisena himself on June 5th — ignoring earlier public protests.

Ironically this is also World Environmental Day! I have here repeated some of the criticisms of a similar project in 2006-7. It is sad that this misguided venture of distributing lands belonging to the citizens of Uva-Vellassa should be reinstated this year.

Often when I tell friends and acquaintances in Colombo that I am conducting field research in this region, they want to know “where is Vellassa,” which only goes to illustrate that the city of Colombo is today another world, separate culturally from the rest of the nation. Uva-Vellassa is a vast area and by today’s reckoning consists of the districts of Badulla, Monaragala and Amparai.

It was the area that heralded the famous rebellion of 1817-1818. It was also this vast region that was systematically and completely destroyed by the British in what I have called the “rape of Uva-Vellassa.”

In my view, the present hasty and ill-considered allocation of a vast area of land to a foreign company by the government constitutes the “second rape of Uva-Vellassa.”

In the first part of this paper I shall deal briefly with the historic role of this region during the rebellion and in the second part present the government proposals for the “development” of this region alongside my criticisms of the project.

Vellassa and the 1818 rebellion

Vellassa is historically important as the locus of the first major rebellion against British rule during the period 1817-1818, the only rebellion that embraced virtually all the Kandyan kingdom and nearly toppled the colonial government. It was triggered by local issues but later became a rebellion against British rule when Dorai Svami, who was believed to be a direct descendent of the Nayakkar kings emerged as a claimant to the throne. I shall simply refer to this person as the “claimant” or “Prince” because people simply accepted him as the legitimate heir to the throne.

A key feature of the uprising was the role of the Vaddas led by a distinguished Kandyan Vadda chief, Kivulegedera Mohottala. He mobilized their forces in support of the Prince, thereby expressing the traditional Vadda loyalty to the Kandyan kings. Apparently around July 1817 the claimant visited the shrine of Skanda at Kataragama and announced that the god had appointed him to be king. Already crowds were beginning to receive the claimant and his entourage as they travelled from Kataragama to Buttala. Soon the infamous master spy John D’Oyly, suspecting the seriousness of the situation, sent a Muslim spy to find out the location of the claimant.

He failed although he did report that people were excited with the news that a legitimate claimant to the throne had appeared. Eventually, the Prince came to Kokagala near Padiyatalava, the sacred mountain of the Vaddas and here he was under the protection of the Vadda chief, Kivulegedera. The Prince claimed his intention was to restore the kingdom seized by foreigners. Many local chiefs gathered there including Maha Badulugama Rate Rala of Uva, and Kivulegedera who was appointed Disava of Valapana by the claimant in addition to his own previous division of Viyaluva, all in the region of Vellassa.

Wilson, the resident of Badulla at the time, was asked to interview the “stranger” in person but he could not be easily located. Wilson therefore dispatched a contingent to seize him, a difficult task because the Prince was in Kehelulla under the protection of two hundred Vaddas. In the village of Bakinigaha, the contingent was confronted with a group armed with bows and arrows and led by Butava Rate Rala, captured, and sent to Kokagala and there sentenced to death by the Prince. It was at this juncture that the local chiefs joined the movement which soon developed into a more general resistance against British rule.

When Wilson heard of this disaster he himself went in early December with twenty Malay and Kaffir soldiers under Lieutenant Newman and reached the village of Butava. Butava Rate Rala had fled into the forest but Wilson managed to spend the night in the village unmolested. He decided to go back but was confronted with hostile crowds at Katturuvalla. Wilson tried to negotiate with them but they would have none of it. Taking another route to Badulla he reached the Pattini shrine at Itanavatta, near Bibile. Here he fell back apparently to defecate at a nearby stream when he was killed by Sinhala arrows. A monument for him exists to this very day at the spot. Ironically most of the names of the Sinhala and Vadda chiefs who lead the rebellion hardly appear in the cultural memory outside of this region. Who killed Wilson is a matter of contestation to this very day by the leading families in this region.

A week after Wilson’s death the Prince “assumed the name Viravikrama Sri Kirti and appointed the Household officials whom court etiquette rendered necessary,” according to Paul E. Pieris from whom I borrow most of the information in this account.

It was then that Simon Sawers, D’Oyly’s trusted second in command, was sent to Badulla on 27 October 1817 to oversee matters. The well-known Kandyan chief Kappitipola Nilame was also sent by D’Oyly to Badulla. The British strategy was to isolate the region and this was done by Major Macdonald who with four detachments moved from Badulla, Kandy and Bintanna and met on the 31st at Ussanvela, near the place of Wilson’s death. Here he engaged in a massive destruction of villagers, their homesteads and their crops. There was only one casualty on the British side, a man who was shot when Kivulegedera’s house in Viyaluva was being burnt down. Such scorched earth tactics became the norm during the rebellion. Pieris points out that such a policy was unthinkable to Kandyans for whom destroying crops even in wars was almost an act of sacrilege. With this development dozens of local leaders known as rate ralas (chiefs of a cluster of villages) joined the movement.

Meanwhile Kappitipola had left Badulla as an emissary of the British to deal with the situation in Vellassa but he was captured by Vaddas at Alupota, on November 1, 1817. According to one of the local histories I am now collecting from the field it was again Kivulegedera who headed the Vaddas. Apparently Kappitipola was effectively surrounded by a force of Sinhalas and Vaddas and they refused to let him leave. The details of the negotiations between Kappitipola and those who captured him are not clear; what is clear is that Kappitipola, from being the agent of the British government, now became the leader of the rebellion and was endowed with the title Pallegamapaha Adigar by the Prince. With Kappitipola’s involvement the rebellion ceased to be a local one and became a national movement in 1818.

I will not deal with the wider spread of the rebellion in this account, except to say that most of the leaders of the rebellion were captured and executed or sent to Mauritius, the notorious penal colony of the British at the time. They may be forgotten by the rest of the country but not forgotten by the people of Vellassa. Following the custom of this region, several of the leaders of the rebellion, among them Kivulegedera, Migahapitiya, Godegedera and Kappitipola, were deified and continue to be propitiated in collective rituals that we have studied. In my view, this movement ought not to be forgotten.

According to Vellassa folk, the term for their region means “the country of hundred thousand fields (vel laksha). An English major writing to the Governor, the year before the rebellion noted: “Every village in Velassy District [contains] the finest, the most beautiful fertile country I have ever seen.”

Yet today, though it is now over a century since the British scorched earth policy, many of the rice fields are still abandoned and it is one of the poorest areas of the country. After the destruction, some of the people fled to the hilly regions such as the Nilgala forest and remained there; others moved to the East Coast and their descendants exist to this very day as Tamil speakers with Sinhala vasagama names. Yet others were forcibly relocated. Sawyers wrote to D’Oyly to say that

Until a clear sweep is made of the principal Chiefs of Walapone and Veyalowa such has been made with those of Vellassa, there will be no security there. … It is upon this ground I would humbly presume to recommend that every individual of the Kivulegedera, Hapatagame, Andawella, Boragolla and Yallegama families should be removed from the Interior.

Compare this with the statement made eighty years later by Archibald Lawrie, an important British civil servant:

The story of the English rule in the Kandyan country during 1817 and 1818 cannot be related without shame. In 1819 hardly a member of the leading families, the heads of the people, remained alive; those whom the sword and the gun had spared, cholera and smallpox and privations had slain by hundreds.

The beneficent and benign pax britannica that followed the rebellion was erected on this terrifying base, as I believe was the case in general with British colonial policy.

In the years that followed vast extents of land were given over to coffee and later tea plantations, especially in Uva. The view that the large tea areas of Uva (and elsewhere) were unpopulated is simply false. For example, Namunukula in Uva is now nothing but a large tea plantation but once it harbored local communities living under the gaze of their god named Indaka.

Neither these communities nor the deity exist today. It is a public shame that most of us have forgotten the past and have reinvented it to give untrammeled Vellassa land to multinational corporations, as if their interests are those of the residents of Uva-Vellassa.

It is this return of colonial polity under the guise of contemporary international capitalist development, the dark or shadow side of the colonial persona of the ruling class, that I think is surfacing in what might soon become the second rape of Uva-Vellassa right now.

The criticisms are obvious and it is surprising that the cabinet did not see the clear loopholes in the project proposal. Part of this is the collective government fantasy: naturally a government strapped for cash would love to save the tremendous expenditure on the import of sugar. But the fact is that not only are we not told how these statistics were arrived at but we also have no idea whether the company and the government ever calculated what happens with the fluctuations of the international sugar market especially in the context of new large-scale sugar cultivations opening up in South America.

And how would Buddhists and Muslims in the area react to the idea of local sugar molasses being converted into alcohol? It is possible that when these newly opened lands are fully operational there might be a glut of sugar and a glut of alcohol products. Then as happened in the earlier case with Pelwatta, alcohol may become its main product. The new project will generously add even more litres of alcohol per year. We can only hope that this will be an export product and not for consumption in a nation already viewed as the second largest consumers of alcohol in the world. The lucrative gains for the government might prove to be illusory and the earnings of farmers might drop drastically.

I can assure the reader that the doomed area is studded with archeological remains, such as Brahmi inscriptions, drip ledge caves where monks meditated and more developed meditational complexes, ruined viharas and Buddha statues (some of whose heads have been lopped off by contemporary treasure seekers).

The conventional wisdom is that there were two civilizations, one in the northern Raja Rata and the other in Ruhuna and just forest in between. Nothing could be further from the truth. Sri Lankan Buddhist civilization was a continuous one and the region of Uva-Vellassa was connected to the north and south to constitute a large and fabulous culture area. There are also remains of a road in the Nilgala forest that local people think linked Mahagama in the south with Anuradhapura in the north.

We believe that by the end of the 15th century, much of this area fell into ruin, except Bintanna-Alutnuvara (Mahiyangana) that remained a powerful centre till at least the beginning of the 16th century It was an entrepot of trade with the East Coast ports and strategically located on the road from the East Coast to Kandy taken by foreign embassies. Bintanna-Alutnuvara was also the place that Kandyan kings sent their families for safe keeping during political troubles. Dutch accounts from around 1602 show it as a place where “the old Emperors used to hold court as it is a beautiful city where there are many large streets, beautiful buildings and wonderful pagodas or heathen temples and among others there is one whose base is 130 paces round, extraordinarily beautiful, very tall …. In it is also a beautiful and large palace of the Emperor full of beautiful buildings within…” What happened to what another Dutch account has called “one of the greatest cities in Asia” is anybody’s guess. Sri Lankans should be dismayed to see a vital part of this region which contains the buried remains of their past history and culture leveled to the ground by tractors.

I want to add that a serious survey of selected sites of this large area must be done and simply cannot be done expeditiously but needs trained personnel and modern equipment and a period of a several years of concentrated effort and study. If this project is implemented one immediate consequence will be the wiping out of these archeological sites.

Nevertheless, let me say that it would be foolish to deny that there might well be immediate benefits for farmers by projects of this sort but it is the long-term consequences that are troubling. I am also not opposed to rational capitalist development. Colombo can perhaps under rational planning become an important trade and industrial centre. But one must object to the predatory form of contemporary global capitalism that often enough occurs at the expense of the nation at large.

It is imperative for the public to know that the approval of this project was done under a veil of secrecy. Few of the villagers I believe are aware of what is in store for them. Surely, a project of this magnitude should be open for public discussion and the input of local experts familiar with conditions here be aired and creatively employed to resolve issues that might ultimately have disastrous consequences for the nation.

We must not forget that the total extent of this small island of ours is only 25,332 square miles. How much of it will we leave for future generations?

Courtesy:Sunday Island