The Dutch also had another European force named the Swiss deMeuron Regiment under their command that was stationed in Trincomalee. In 1781, the French Authorities helped raise a new regiment in the Swiss Canton, soliciting recruits in and around Neuchatel. The regiment was called the deMeuron Regiment, taking its name from the commander, Comte Charles de Meuron. In 1786 the deMeuron Regiment was sent to Ceylon from Cape Town and while in Ceylon the regiment answered to the Dutch Governor Van Anglebeek and to Colonel Pierre de Meuron, the brother of Comte Charles de Meuron who had returned to Switzerland.
At the time of the British conquest in 1796 there were about 900 families of Dutch Burghers residing in Ceylon, concentrated in Colombo, Galle, Matara and Jaffna.
After the British took over the colony from the Dutch, some Dutch Burghers chose to go to Batavia, while others chose to stay in Ceylon.
Many of the paternal ancestors of the Rowlands Family, namely the "Arndt's and others remained in Ceylon and worked for the British.
Just prior to the takeover of the island by
the British an ancestor of the Arndt branch of the Rowlands family (Thomas Nagel) was given
the task of organizing the administration of an area in the North of the
country known as the “Vaani”. The article about his administration and the
Dutch period is reproduced below.
The
Dutch in Ceylon.
The focus had been on the administration
adjustments made by the governor to improve the agriculture and
revenue in the core areas, Colombo, Galle and Jaffna. The emphasis in
these regions lay on the production of cash crops, with cinnamon being the first and
foremost.
However the demand for rice to feed the troops
and the coolies remained a pressing subject and paddy cultivation was
high on Van de Graaff ’s agenda. The rice was meant not only for the
garrison, but also for the cinnamon department and coolies in general: the
more work to be done, the more rice was needed. Around four thousand lasten
of rice a year were needed to sustain the labour force, but the
Dutch could not even get half of that from their possessions on the island.
In 1784/85, the Dutch
regions of Ceylon yielded 1,798 lasten of
rice for government, the year after it was about 1,500 lasten and most
of it came from Matara and Jaffna. For example, Batticaloa did not produce
more than eighty-seven lasten for the Company. Batavia could not furnish Ceylon with as much rice as it had, but still yearly requests were
made to Batavia for supplies of at least eight hundred lasten of rice,
and the expensive contracts with the South Indian traders accounted for the rest.
The high expenses involved in the acquisition
of rice convinced Van de Graaff that the island should really become
self-sufficient in its food crop production. This idea had been proposed earlier
by Van Goens and Van Imhoff, but it was Van de Graaff who made a
concerted effort in this direction. With the cinnamon plantations
blooming in the southwest, he moved his attention to the peripheral Dutch
possessions on the island. It was his intention to turn these regions into a broodkamer
or breadbasket,
for the rest of the island. The areas to the
east of Matara, which had become Dutch after 1766, and to the interior of
Batticaloa, were now actively reclaimed. The same was true of the
Vanni district where the local chiefs, the vanniyars, who had governed
their lands in relative independence, were removed and the Dutch Lieutenant Thomas Nagel
took up the task of improving agriculture.
Here and there, in the Magampattu bordering
Matara dessavony and the Panoa in Batticaloa, Van de Graaff even
extended Dutch authority into Kandyan lands. The measures taken by Van de
Graaff varied greatly. For example he made the headmen promote the technique of
transplanting paddy instead of seeding, because in this way the plants yielded
more grain and less was wasted for the seeds. Another plan of Van de Graaff
related to the planting of manioc or cassava. He thought that if inhabitants
grew manioc for their basic food consumption, this would not
only prevent famines, but
they would also consume less paddy allowing
them to sell the surplus to the Company. He enthusiastically sent the
manioc plants around to all stations, with instructions on how to grow it,
but the inhabitants were not easily converted to this new foodstuff and the
plan was a failure. He also
intended to colonize the sparsely inhabited
regions of the island with migrants from South India, Indonesia, or China.
With the exception of a group of sipahis settling in the Panoa,
these operations did not succeed either.
Other plans regarded irrigation and waterworks
on the island. Great expectations were set on the Giant’s tank close
to Mannar. However financing its repair was difficult to arrange
because Batavia refused to invest in such a large and expensive project.
Van de Graaff hoped that he could get around this with private investment,
but did not succeed in raising enough money. Similar plans were made for the
Kantelai tank near Trincomalee, but never put into effect despite
all the preliminary work
put into the investigations by the engineers
and the officials of Mannar and Trincomalee. We have already seen that in
the Matara dessavony some undertakings were started with great zeal
by the dessava Christiaan van Angelbeek. There the problem was not so
much the preservation of
water, but rather the drainage of surplus water
that caused flooding in the rainy season. Several canals were dug for this
purpose in the Gangebaddepattu and the Magampattu, but not all were finished
by the arrival of the British. Moreover the work in Matara was
hampered by the rebellion of 1790, which made Van de Graaff and his
successor more prudent in undertaking these large projects.
The rebellion in Matara has been discussed
briefly in the context of the private power struggles among Company
officials. It was pointed out that the headmen played a role in this as well;
those who were losing out on the new projects were especially against it.
But from the first reports about
the rebellion it is clear that the inhabitants
themselves objected to working on the canal as coolies (as they had done in
the previous years) because they expected a good crop and did not want to
spend their time working for the Company or the headmen. They were
afraid to be pressed into
their work by the headmen on the order of the dessava
Christiaan van Angelbeek. Although the work on the canal was
heavy and they were most likely not well-treated, they had not
rebelled against it previously, and it is probable that in times of bad harvest
work on the canal at least provided them with basic provisions of rice and a
little money that enabled them to feed their families. What is of interest here is that in good times
the inhabitants could not see any advantage in working on the canal even
though it could in the end also be of advantage to them, because it aimed
to prevent floods in the
rainy season. The rebellion in Matara is an
example of how colonial intervention led to a clash of mentality
between the Dutch and the native population that was not easily overcome. This
was even more the case in regions where contact between the natives and
the Company had been rare, like in the Vanni, Trincomalee, and
Batticaloa. These new encounters and colonial interventions in the periphery,
through an analysis of the reports and memoranda written by Jacques Fabrice van
Senden, Thomas Nagel, and Jacob Burnand on their operations in these districts.
New encounters in the periphery: a journey
around Trincomalee.
The “discovery” of the periphery led to new encounters
between the native population and the Dutch officials.
These did not always go smoothly and it was not an easy task to
implement the same energetic policies in these regions as had been done in
the core. The diary of the exploratory journey that Van Senden, head of
Trincomalee, undertook in the spring of 1786, gives insight into this
interaction and how both the Dutch and the natives experienced this new
encounter.251 It also reveals
the utilitarian attitude of the Dutch regarding
the nature and people of Ceylon, and it went hand in hand with the
discovery of the island’s rich past in this northeastern dry zone. Moreover it
very clearly reveals the clash of interests between the natives and the
Dutch and their different
perceptions of their environment.
Van Senden’s journal consists of four parts.
The first part, about his journey through Kottiyar, is the most extensive. This
is followed by an account of the possible measures to be taken to
improve the agriculture there. The third and fourth part, about
Tamblegam and Kattukolom, are much shorter. In those sections, Van Senden
refers often to earlier remarks he made about Kottiyar, which was
connected to Kattukolom by the bay of Trincomalee; Tamblegam was located
more inland, and bordered the territories of the Kingdom of Kandy. The
land on the coast is by and large flat, but in the interior the
landscape is more diverse with plains and hilly areas. Salt production on the
coast of Kattukolom formed an important industry for the region. The salt
was mainly purchased by
traders from Kandy and by the VOC in
Trincomalee. The hinterland of Trincomalee was densely populated and had an
impressive past. Van Senden describes with great interest the
remains of temples, bridges and irrigation works of the ancient kingdoms that
he saw on his travels. The
most impressive ruin of all was that of the
water tank of Kantelai in Tamblegam.
Van Senden travelled by boat, horse and
palanquin and had himself accompanied by the most prominent native
headmen of the area. In Kottiyar he was assisted by the vanniyar Irroemarooewentoega
Ideewirasinga Nallemapane, in Tamblegam by the mudaliyar Don
Fransisco
Kannegerandge Kannegeritna and in
Kattukolompattu by the vanniyar Don Joan Sandere Seegere Mapane Wangenaar. The
local population took care of provisioning the group. The first
thing Van Senden did when arriving in the villages was to make up a
register of all male inhabitants. The villages on the coast numbered up to a
hundred men, but the other settlements were much smaller, with only seven
or eight adult men. In some places, in particular in Tamblegam and
Kattukolom, it was impossible to count the inhabitants, because they fled.
Van Senden’s visit to Moedoer, the first
village he called at, may serve as an example of his encounters. The village
was relatively large, with one hundred fourteen adult males, and was
located on the coast at the mouth of the river Kinge. The first thing Van
Senden noticed was that
there was a lot of waste land. The paddy fields
that were in use looked fine, but the water tank that had to supply the
land in the dry season was not well placed. It lay too low and as a
consequence the water could not reach the fields. He therefore showed the
people how they could water the fields using dam and pipe-constructions, so
they could also exploit the waste lands. He inspected the river and
wondered whether a water mill could be placed there to saw timber. Next he
checked whether the river could be diked to prevent floods in the wet
season. He explained the inhabitant that the higher grounds, which were
not used at all, were perfectly suited to growing fruit bearing trees. He
thought of plantations of between three thousand and twenty-two thousand
coconut palms. Van Senden did not understand why the inhabitants
did not put effort into producing more; they could barter the surplus
and the population would increase and this in turn would lead to higher
production.
The un-sown paddy fields, water regulation and
the poor fruit tree plantations are subjects that recur again and again in the
text. Many times Van Senden pointed this out to the vanniyar who
travelled with him, and encouraged him “to make better use of that
which nature had given him and his people so generously”. He saw
everything in terms of exploitation: the rivers were waterways or energy providers,
the land was meant to be used as paddy field or plantation, and the
river clay waited to be used for the production of bricks and tiles. Wild
buffalo were suitable draught animals for tilling the soil, wild elephants
could be caught and traded with India. Van Senden even tried to transmit
his own technological knowledge to the inhabitants, in the case of
the dam-and-pipe construction in Moedoer.
Van Senden’s utilitarian attitude towards
nature emerges frequently, and he is almost as often disappointed with the
state of the agriculture and the commitment of the inhabitants.
Sometimes he was pleasantly surprised though, for example when he visited
the village Pattianoette, with only thirteen inhabitants, on Saturday 10
June: “There is a little pagoda here which has nothing special, except
for the brahmin priest, who loves planting and has planted part of the
empty space that usually
adjoins the pagodas, with lime trees and other
fruit-bearing trees.” Van Senden liked this so much, that he promised the
man seeds and pits of other fruit trees to extend his orchard.
Van Senden did not pay attention only to
agriculture. He was also interested in the roads and rivers. Here he was
confronted with the limitations that nature forced upon people and he
complained much about it. Because of the heat, he could only travel early
in the morning or late in the afternoon, and sometimes he even travelled
at night. The rivers turned out to be un-navigable because the riverbeds had
run dry, or had grown thick with mangrove forest. Paths to specific
destinations often turned out
to be impassable and “made for no one but
forest people”. Elephants occasionally formed an obstacle when he
travelled through Tamblegam: in large numbers they obstructed the road and
terrified his retinue. The elephants could only be scared away by gun
shots. Above all this, van Senden was feeling ill during his whole
journey. He could sometimes barely feel his fingers and sometimes his
nerves troubled him so much that could not continue the journey. In
Kottiyar and Tamblegam in particular he suffered much from mosquitoes at night.
Despite everything, Van Senden often expressed
his admiration for the natural environment. On the plain close to the
village of Kooijkoederipie settlements were built on small hills and the
plain was used for paddy culture: all these islands or raisings are covered with
coconut palms like feathers and
the pattern of light green of the fields that
have not been reaped yet, and the hayish-yellow of those that have already
completed the reaping, and the dark green of the trees, shows us one of those
spectacles which convinces us, like with everything, of the supremacy of nature
above art.
It is typical of Van Senden’s attitude that he
uses the word nature when he is talking not about a wild jungle, but
about a landscape that has been.
Clash of cultures: useful versus threatening
nature
The interesting thing about the travel journal
is that Van Senden wrote down not only his own observations, but also
the inhabitants’s responses to his suggestions. When Van Senden proposed in
the village of Moedoer that everyone should produce more than they
needed for themselves, he
was told that “Through the outbreak of
diarrhea and children’s diseases for some years now, the country had become
depopulated [...] and each of the few remaining people do not cultivate
more than what they need in one year.” From the villagers’ answers to
his suggestions, it becomes clear that their existence was very insecure
because of certain natural factors. Therefore they could not see the point of
expanding agricultural output. The region was plagued by wild animals, and
hordes of wild elephants in particular who damaged the fields and
panthers and bears who prowled about the district. The climate often
worked against them: in the rainy season floods could ruin the crop, but
long periods of drought also had damaging effects. Finally, in the previous
period many people had
died from disease. Remarkably enough, Van
Senden did not recognize this problem; apparently the people must have
looked healthy at the moment he travelled there.
Apart from all this, Van Senden met a lot of
distrust from the inhabitants with regard to himself as a white
representative of the Dutch government. Sometimes the inhabitants fled when they were
informed of his approach. They feared be taken as slaves, or
being eaten by his Malay soldiers.
Van Senden thought this nonsense and tried to
convince them of his good intentions by explaining the purpose
of his trip and by offering useful instruction, giving them extra sowing
seed and promising them postponement of taxes. Still, it did not always
work, as the example of his meeting with the men of Elendetorre shows.
There, Van Senden explained how fruit-bearing trees were best
planted. He subsequently asked the inhabitants whether they would start
planting trees straight away, if he would provide them with seeds or
offshoot: After murmuring for some time, an ancient man,
who could not have much hope of enjoying those fruits, came forward,
and said with a smiling face: “why would we go into all this trouble, our
grandfathers and fathers never did it.” This was agreed upon by all the
attendants.
According to Van Senden this inertia was the
inhabitants’ most evil quality and had to change.
Van Senden portrayed the native inhabitants not
only as inert, but also as simple and angst-ridden. These
characteristics came to the fore most strongly in the folk tales he collected. Van
Senden was mainly interested in stories related to the prominent ruins he
encountered. In Tamblegam for example he passed a river with a few
standing pillars in the middle. The local people believed that these had been
placed there by a mythical washerwoman. This woman appears again and again
in the local accounts explaining the origin of the large ruins. Van
Senden concluded however that the pillars would have been part of a
bridge, of which the upper part was gone.
Although Van Senden was sometimes a little
scornful of the folk stories, his interest in them was sincere. Most
attention was paid to the stories that related to the ancient water tank of
Kantelai. The people turned out very fearful for the water tank. […] in the morning at four forty I left Kooij
Koederieppoe for the infamous, and never mentioned without fright by the
Mallabars, Kantelai tank. They tried everything to prevent me from going;
warnings, admonitions and the worst: citing the many examples, which I knew
were true, of curious people, who died shortly after the visit or never
recovered from lingering diseases, but nothing helped; the usefulness of the
Kantalai tank, for the agriculture of the province Tamblegammo was too important
for me not to see it with my own eyes–for the notorious devil Poedem, who
had made the facing of the tank in six days as servant of the King
Kollekooten and still guards it, I had no fear, but I dreaded the poultice and
cooked mess of the superstitious […].
In deference to the strong aversion of the
people, he decided to ask the “heathen priest” for permission beforehand. He
explained to the inhabitants that he took their warnings seriously, but that
he wished to behold himself the structure “that I thought was made
by humans, though they attributed it to spirits”. He would however
behave respectfully and hoped that the inhabitants would join him in seeing
it.
Despite all warnings Van Senden visited the
tank and was clearly much impressed by the enormous construction.
Moreover, he showed his companions that the irrigation tank could be made ready
for use through a few minor operations like taking away the mud
in the pipes. He ordered the headmen who had joined him that in future
the tank had to be cleaned in the dry season by all the
inhabitants together. Those who did not cooperate would not be allowed to make use
of the water for the irrigation of their fields.
The section on the Kantelai tank is essential
to understanding the differences in outlook between Van Senden and the
inhabitants. Van Senden depicts himself as the all-knowing, rational
European, in sharp contrast with the primitive and superstitious indigenous
population. The fact that the inhabitants attributed a structure like the
water tank of Kantelai to devils revealed their fearful and primitive
nature and their incapacity to control nature and adapt it to their needs. The
remains of temples, bridges and, water tanks did however point at a
higher civilization and more intensive use of the land in the past, and
a higher population density. This rich past appealed to Van Senden’s
imagination and strengthened his belief that the region could turn prosperous
once more. It is no
coincidence that in his scheme for improvement,
he laid great emphasis on the ancient civilization of the inhabitants.
Civilization as universal remedy
Apart from the suggestions for improvement of
agriculture made on the spot, Van Senden also formulated a more general
plan for the exploitation of the land. He was of the opinion that three
factors could contribute to its improvement. In the first place, the region
had to become more densely
populated again. He thought that under certain
conditions the Company might attract South Indians, Malay soldiers
after they resigned service or even Chinese to settle in the
region. But basically, he was of the opinion that the inhabitants had to produce
more children, for this would give them more economic security.
This point relates to the second and third
factors. Van Senden felt on the one hand that people had to make an effort
to become more active and enterprising. On the other hand he believed
that the Company had to invest in tools and seeds for every village
and that the Company should not raise taxes for a few years in order to
give the people a chance to substantially increase the agricultural output. Finally he
thought it would be best if every province had a European
superintendent. This was impossible to arrange from one day to the other, not only
because the Company did not have the funds for it, but also because
of the people’s fear of white men. Moreover in the case of Kattukolom, the
inhabitants were strongly attached to their own headmen and would
probably not accept the
authority of a European resident. Van Senden
realized that the Company would not be prepared to invest on a large
scale and that the chances of successful colonization by outsiders was small.
Therefore, Van Senden expected most from the
change in the attitude of the people and his text is full of
references to this. It was not for nothing that he cited with pleasure the story
of the washerman who gave his life when attempting to remedy the blockage
of the Tamblegammo tank by a large fish. “For the honour of
mankind I wish to record this case as true, to have it carved on a stone in
various languages and to write underneath in Golden letters: What a man! what
a father! but most of all
what a fellow citizen!” Van Senden considered
this story an elevating example for the inhabitants.
This elaboration on Van Senden’s journey
reveals many of the practical issues at stake in the late eighteenth century
Sri Lanka. It shows Europeans’ growing self-confidence in relation to the
management of nature, the sense that all natural obstacles could be
overcome by human knowl-
edge and power. It also reveals an obsession
with the island’s ancient and rich past that strengthened his conviction that
the region could and had to be more intensely cultivated. Van Senden
strongly contrasted himself with the native population, who are clearly in
need of European guidance
to improve their lives and that of their
children. The natives’ fear of Europeans shows how little the Dutch had
intruded into this region so far, although their fear could also be
explained by their recent experience with French and the English troops behaving
ruthlessly while they occupied the harbour of Trincomalee between 1782 and
1784.
Van Senden was not very sensitive to the actual
problems of the inhabitants, in particular the diseases which afflicted them
repeatedly. We now know that it was a malaria-prone area, and the
debilitating influence of structural malaria on a population is a well
known fact. Van Senden did not notice it because he did not know about it,
he could not connect the stories about the devil poedem with the
anopheles mosquito that probably bred in the tanks. His energetic and
progressive attitude is typical of the period of Van de Graaff ’s governorship, and
not surprisingly Van Senden was strongly attached to Van de Graaff. The
outcomes of Van Senden’s schemes for improvement were limited. Residents
were appointed on his advice and the income from the paddy tithe
increased fivefold, which points at significant improvements. But
although the engineer Fornbauer made a precise plan for its repair in 1792, the
Kantelai tank was never fully repaired. Van Senden died within three
years after the journey.
Colonial intervention in the Vanni
In his own memoir Van de Graaff
dealt in great length with the progress of the paddy cultivation in all
regions of the island. He stated that much progress had been made in this field
in the previous years, with the exception of the Colombo dessavony where
most workers were involved in cinnamon
culture and could therefore not be
involved in the improvement of the paddy culture. However, a lot
had been achieved in other regions, notably, the outer parts of Matara,
Batticaloa, the Vanni, and even a little in Trincomalee.
The achievements are difficult to
assess, but if we are to believe Van de Graaff they were great and
promising. We have seen already that Van Senden’s plans for Trincomalee
resulted in some expansion of agricultural output. The most structural approach
had been in Batticaloa and the Vanni, where administrative reforms
were more extensive and intensely supervised by two enterprising
officials. In Batticaloa it was Jacob Burnand, a young man from
Switzerland who had arrived on the island in 1778, and in the Vanni it was Lieutenant Thomas Nagel. Both brought into cultivation. fully
improved the agricultural situation in these neglected districts and their
reputations lasted into British times. As we shall see, Governor Maitland used their work as example
for his own policies in those regions and beyond. Therefore, their work
merits a more extensive discussion. The Vanni district covered the large
area between the Jaffna peninsula and the Kingdom of Kandy and was largely
inhabited by people of Tamil origin. Before the late eighteenth century,
the administration of the Vanni had been the most obvious example of
the VOC’s system of indirect rule.271 The vanniyars, or
local chiefs, were in theory subordinated to the Company and under the commandment of
Jaffna. They had to pay a yearly tribute of forty elephants to
the Company, but the Company did not otherwise meddle in their
administration and they maintained a fair degree of autonomy. In the course of
the eighteenth century their obligations became diluted and during the 1770s
the Jaffna commander was complaining repeatedly that the vanniyars
were in arrears on the payment of their tribute. By 1780, troubles
in the district caused by a succession struggle in one of the provinces of
the Vanni allowed the colonial administration to step in.
The Company considered taking over
the whole district, but due to the scale of the operation Governor
Willem Iman Falck decided that only the province Karnawelpattu should be
brought under direct Dutch rule. It was an experiment, and the aim was
to learn how much profit this province would bring the Company. Falck
had reason to have high expectations, since it was common knowledge that
in ancient times the district had produced high yields. The
resident, Mr Sprang, was requested to do everything in his power to improve
agriculture. By 1784, the vanniyars in the other provinces started to
rebel against the Dutch, which gave Governor Falck a reason to organize
a punitive expedition. Under command of the Lieutenant Thomas Nagel, the provinces were conquered one by one. Nagel was appointed as head
of the district and commissioned to improve the cultivation of paddy and
increase the revenues of the district.
In 1789, Nagel requested that the
colonial government lease him the district for five years. Under
his proposal he would personally make the necessary expenses to improve
the local situation, provided he would be allowed to keep all revenue from
it, except for the paddy-tithe. The military expenses would still be
paid by government. His request was honoured.
In 1794, Nagel requested an
extension of the lease and wrote a memorandum to explain the successes achieved so
far and his plans for the future. The memorandum is divided in
nine paragraphs. The first four give an introduction to the
district, its nature, its people and its history. Paragraphs five and six are
concerned with the history of the Company’s presence in the district. Nagel
describes how and why it was occupied and what improvements were made
especially in the field of agriculture. In the
following two sections Nagel
elaborates on the strategic importance of the Vanni and gives a description of his
plans for further improvement of agriculture. The final paragraph
discusses his new proposal for the next ten years. Nagel’s achievements in
the district were considerable: he improved the income of paddy,
collected as the Company’s tithe, from 14,000 parrahs of paddy to
36,000 parrahs.275 In addition, the income from taxes on gardens and trade
increased. What measures did he take to achieve this?
Thomas Nagel started with an
administrative reorganization based on the Dutch administrative system in
Jaffna. In the aftermath of his expeditions, he had put aside the vanniyars, and
in the new government they were left out. The civil
administration consisted of ten, later twelve, Europeans or men of European descent
and eighty natives, of whom sixty were lascorins. Next to that
he adopted a headmen system: eighteen mudaliyars were put in charge of the provincial
government and thirty-six majorals were to work under them. The new
land-courts were to apply the Jaffanese laws to the Vanni. Even
the organization of the taxes and land revenues were copied from the Jaffna
system. He ordered a hoofdtombo (family register, for the purpose of
taxation) to be made and decided that like in Jaffna the people would be
obliged to work twelve days a year for the Company (or to pay one rixdollar
and four stivers for each day they did not work). The land tax was
fixed at a tenth of the crop, to be paid either in kind or in money.
The increase in agricultural output
was achieved by three measures. First, after the bad harvests of
1787 and 1788 caused by a lack of rain Nagel lent seed to the peasants on
his own account, to ensure a reasonable crop the following year. Second, he
started a land registry, identifying the wasteland suitable for
exploitation and reporting on the condition of the water-tanks belonging to the
occupied fields. Because many of the tanks were in a bad state, he made a
plan to repair them and figured that
in total about twenty-five thousand
rixdollars were needed to fix them all. Nagel shouldered the burden of these
investments himself as part of the contract he made with Governor Van
de Graaff in 1789. In the same year he employed four natives in the
function of adig¯ar with the specific task
of overseeing the agriculture and
the repair of the tanks. By 1793, much progress had been made, but more
time was needed to meet the objectives. He planned to set up sugar, coffee
and cotton plantations by forcing the poor inhabitants from the
overcrowded Jaffna district to move to the Vanni and work on his
plantations. He also intended to make the people of the Vanni cultivate these cash
crops for the Company with one part of their fields. These plans were
inspired by Anthony Blom’s 1787 treatise on sugar, cotton, coffee and cacao
plantations in Surinam.279 Nagel regretted the fact that it was too complicated
to keep African slaves on the island to set up a plantation on
Blom’s model, but he considered his own plan a good alternative.
Nagel’s rule over of the Vanni was
quite different from that of the vanniyars. The changes directly touched the
interest of the people owing to the imposition of new taxes, the
regulation of personal services and the fixing of land revenues. It was
turned from a system of indirect rule based on feudal relations and only limited
Company power to a relatively well organized state under European authority
and a European administrative elite. The new organization was
geared to agricultural development rather than to trade. The vanniyars saw
their power curtailed by Nagel and no longer played an official role in
the inland administration. It is not clear whether or not they kept some power
over the inhabitants based on their former position and traditional
status.
Administrative reform in Batticaloa
The eight provinces of Batticaloa were governed
by a chief of the rank of onderkoopman, from 1766 onwards. Jacob Burnand was the second person to hold this post, after his predecessor
Francke had held it for eighteen years. Burnand was of Swiss origin and had
arrived in Batavia in 1775 in the position of onderkoopman, and
moved to Ceylon in 1778. It had been his intention to return to Europe in 1794
as a man in bonis after nineteen years of service in the East, but due
to circumstances he had been forced to stay on the island and he
remained there even after the British take-over. Burnand wrote his memorandum
for reasons that differed considerably from those of Nagel. He wanted to
provide his successor Johannes Phillipus Wambeek with all the
information necessary for
the administration of the district and, in his
own words, “particularly [with] the plan which I am of the opinion
should be constantly followed in order to answer the well-grounded
expectation of making further improvements”. Like Nagel, Burnand had come to
the district with the governor’s commission to improve the
agriculture and increase the income of paddy. In this he succeeded, by
enlarging the income from the tenth on paddy fivefold, from 17,010 parrahs
to almost 60,000 parrahs. He even predicted that if policies were
continued along the same lines, in future it would be possible to obtain
one last or 84,000 parrahs of paddy. The measures he took to achieve this
were as follows. When Burnand arrived in Batticaloa he ruled
over about forty thousand people and had twelve European civil servants
at his command. For the administration of the district the
chief had to rely heavily on the co-operation of the native headmen, called hoofd-pedies.
These men collected
the paddy tithe for the Company and functioned
as justices in the rural assembly. They all came from a group of
about five hundred families who held half the fields in the district and
who had also served as headmen under Kandyan rule. These families were
called Mukuvassen.
Soon after his arrival Burnand perceived two
major defects in the administration of the district. The first was
in the organization of the collection of the tithe: the headmen tended to keep the
larger part of the tenth for themselves. The second deficiency lay
in the organization of the oeliam-services (corvée labour), which put the burden on the field labourers, the group of people who in his opinion were the
crucial factor in achieving any improvement in agriculture. Due
to their connection to the
land, they were easy victims for the headmen
who had to organize the oeliam-services. By forcing them to perform the Company’s heavy cooliework like dragging timber, they got worn out and
were taken away from their daily task of working on the land. As a
result they spent less time on the fields and produced only a small harvest.
Other people, who were supposed to perform services bribed their
headmen or hid from them. Just like Van de Graaff, Burnand aimed to
rationalize the taxes and
services, and to increase control over the
headmen. To achieve this, he developed a consistent bureaucracy. He did not
abolish the corvée duties of the field labourers, but he decided that
they were not to be used anymore to perform heavy labour for the Company.
Instead their services would consist only of activities that would
improve agricultural conditions such as repairing tanks and dams vital for the
irrigation of their fields. At the same time, the people who were
not involved in agriculture were registered carefully and their traditional
duties were fixed. Burnand categorized society in eighteen castes,
or occupational groups. He registered all groups and his memorandum
discusses the functions of each in society, their size, their place of
abode and the taxes and services
that each owed to the Company.
At first he had organized the paddy collection
in a manner similar to the way Van de Graaff had done it in the
southwest. The headmen were kept responsible for the organization and
supervision of agriculture, and the paddy taxes were farmed out to the highest
bidder. By 1789 Burnand came to the conclusion that he could not rely
on the headmen at all, despite his efforts to strengthen his control
over them: All pains taken to make use of these headmen in
carrying the present regulations into effect [have] proved fruitless either by
their negligence or reluctance to take the trouble upon them or because they
saw no chance to enrich themselves with the revenue of Government […].
Therefore he decided to overlook the headmen
and organized a native administration, composed of canicopolies, native
accountants, and canga-nies, overseers. Their tasks were clearly defined and they received a fixed salary. He described in detail how these native
servants should function, how they had to make use of “annotation olas”
(palm leaves) to report on the crop and its collection, and how often they
should make these reports and send them to the secretary’s office. His
attitude towards these civil servants was rigid. He stressed that they only
worked properly if the authority of the chief was firmly established
by punishing them heavily from the outset for every little attempt at
fraud. Here he deviated from the policies of Van de Graaff for the
southwest, but resembled more the
administration of Nagel in the Vanni.
By installing this twofold administration,
Burnand aimed at marginalizing the headmen and rendering the Company
independent of them. Despite some temporary opposition from the
headmen, this was achieved in course of time and he was able to state that
the “most part of them is at present entirely unnecessary and may be
dispensed with, the sole utility will be to let them act as controllers of the
native servants […]”. The headmen’s income was further curtailed by the
prohibition against accepting any presents from inferior chiefs or to taking
fines in court. In fact, these prohibitions had been brought in to
practice after the proclamations of Van de Graaff against the taking of the paresses,
a step which was highly praised by Burnand in this memorandum.
Another step to limit the power of the headmen
over the people was taken in the field of justice. Burnand
reorganized the rural assemblies: instead of every six weeks, as under his
predecessor, they were held only twice a year. Moreover, they functioned not as
the main courts for all sorts of civil and criminal cases, but mainly as an
agricultural board where the expected harvests and revenues were discussed.
Only cases that could directly be decided upon could be brought to
trial here. This was done to improve the legal security of the common
people, since they were often opponents of the headmen in the court cases. In
1789 a landraad was established. Native judges were appointed
directly by the Company and the headmen played no role here. The final
responsibility of the verdicts
lay in the hands of the Dutch chief of
Batticaloa, which gave him great authority over both the people and the headmen.
In his discussion of plans for the future,
Burnand elaborated on the importance of trade for the district. He was of
the opinion that free trade in local agricultural products and circulation
of money would prove to be an encouragement for agriculture. He stated
that in previous times, the price of grain had been kept artificially low,
which kept people from producing more than what they needed themselves. He
criticized the Company’s general policy of monopolizing even local trade
and he praised the measures taken by Van de Graaff in 1786 to
leave the paddy-trade in the district free.
Conclusion
For the first time, not only the southwest and
Jaffna peninsula were subject to the processes of colonial intervention. The
peripheral regions’ experience of colonial intrusion was however
very different from that in the core regions. Here the main aim of the
colonial rulers was to increase the production of rice, and Van de Graaff
explicitly designated these areas as the storage-rooms for the rest of the
island.
Although the governor increased the
agricultural output, this was not entirely a success story. In Matara the native
labourers rebelled against the continuous call for labour. In general, the
increased exploitation seems to have weighed heavily on the backs of the
peasants. The new opportunities
for some of the native chiefs caused jealousies
among them and some of the Dutch officials. In the peripheral
districts, the Dutch heads like Van Senden found that it was not an easy task
to convince the local inhabitants to produce more than they needed for
themselves. The continuous struggle for life and the natural and mystical
threats that surrounded them made it useless in their eyes to expand
their agricultural production. And although the administrators of
the peripheral districts managed to increase the output of paddy, the
clash of cultures and mentalities reveals the limited reach of colonial plans and
policies, something with which the British were to deal with as
well.
In the peripheral districts the native
administration was dealt with very differently than in the core districts. There,
the former elites were banned from their position and replaced by either
Dutch or Portuguese burghers in the Vanni, or by men from the Vellalle caste
in Batticaloa. Clearly they found themselves in a very different position
from the powerful native headmen in the southwest. Did this relate to a
weak social-economic organization in the region, the absence of
Kandyan interests in these
regions, or the very specific historical
collaboration between the Dutch and the headmen in the southwest? This question
will be taken up in the later
The Arndt Family Genealogy is listed at the end of this blog.
The store staff could not tell us the name of the artist who did the carving of this magnificent artwork, but we still thought it such an interesting piece of sculpture from one single piece of wood that we bought it and had it shipped back to Australia.
