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V R Sarath Chandra ON E LA ND , ON E FL AG ,
Security
ON E HE A RT
Sport The Sri Lankan independence movement was a peaceful political movement
LO N G J OU R NE Y TO
World which aimed at achieving independence and self-rule for Ceylon from the
F R EE DO M
Letters British Empire. It was initiated around the turn of the 20th century lead
Obituaries
mostly by the educated middle class and ultimately was successful when T UR NING PO INT IN
C U LT U R E AN D AR T S
February 4, 1948 Ceylon was granted independence as the Dominion of
OTHER
Ceylon. Dominion status within the British Commonwealth was retained for C e yl on ' s j o ur ne y t o
PUBLICATIONS the next 24 years until May 22, 1972 when it became a republic and was In d e p e nd e n ce
renamed the Republic of Sri Lanka.
OTHER LINKS S R I LA NK A IN 20 4 8 !

The British Raj was dominant in Asia after the Battle of Assaye; following the
S I XT Y F IFT H N at i on a l
Battle of Waterloo the British Empire became the world superpower. Its D AY !
appearance of omnipotence was only briefly dented by setbacks in India,
Afghanistan and South Africa. It was virtually unchallenged until 1914. IN D EP EN DE N CE OF TH E
AR T S
   
The formation of the EP IC H E R O IS M O F
Batavian Republic in the P A T R IO T S
Netherlands as an ally
S O VER EI G N T Y - C OLO NY
and of the French - S OV E R EI G NT Y
Directory, led to a British
attack on Ceylon in 1795 ‘ F REE DO M IS A
R E SP ON S IB ILIT Y ’
as part of England's war
against the French IN D EP EN DE N CE
Republic. The Kandyan M O V EME NT O F P R E -SR I
LA N K A
Kingdom collaborated
with the British P R ES ID E NT M AH IND A
expeditionary forces R A J AP AK S A
R E SU S C IT A T E D AN D
against the Dutch, as it
R E V IVE D T H E
had with the Dutch IN D EP EN DE N CE OF
against the Portuguese. 1 94 8

P R O JE CT IN G
Once the Dutch had
EX P EC T AT IO N S T O N E W
been evicted, their sovereignty ceded by the Treaty of Amiens and HE IG H T S
subsequent revolts in the low-country suppressed, the British began planning
to capture the Kandyan Kingdom. The 1803 and 1804 invasions of the
  Kandyan provinces in the 1st Kandyan War were bloodily defeated. In 1815,    
the British fomented a revolt by the Kandyan aristocracy against the last

Kandyan
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P R I N T A B L E and marched
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F E E D B Ainto
C K | uplands to depose him in the 2nd

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The struggle against the colonial power began in 1817 with the Uva
Rebellion, when the same aristocracy rose against British rule in a rebellion
in which their villagers participated.
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attempt at rebellion sparkedProduced

again bybriefly in Copyright
Lake House 1830. ©The 2013Kandyan
The Associatedpeasantry
Newspapers of Ceylon Ltd.

were stripped of their lands by the Comments Wastelands Ordinance,

and suggestions a modern
to :
Web Editor
enclosure movement and reduced to penury.

In 1848 the abortive Matale Rebellion, led by Hennedige Francisco Fernando

(Puran Appu) and Gongalegoda Banda was the first transitional step towards
abandoning the feudal form of revolt, being fundamentally a peasant revolt.
The masses were without the leadership of their native King (deposed in
1815) or their chiefs (either crushed after the Uva Rebellion or collaborating
with the colonial power).

The leadership passed for the first time in the Kandyan provinces into the
hands of ordinary people, non-aristocrats. The leaders were yeomen-
artisans, resembling the Levellers in England's revolution and mechanics
such as Paul Revere and Tom Paine who were at the heart of the American
Revolution. However, in the words of Colvin R. de Silva, ‘it had leaders but
no leadership. The old feudalists were crushed and powerless. No new class
capable of leading the struggle and heading it towards power had yet arisen.’

In the 1830s, coffee was introduced into Sri Lanka, a crop which flourishes in
high altitudes, and grown on the land taken from the peasants. The principal
impetus to this development of capitalist production in Sri Lanka was the
decline in coffee production in the West Indies, following the abolition of
slavery there.

However, the dispossessed peasantry were not employed on the plantations:

The Kandyan villagers refused to abandon their traditional subsistence
holdings and become wage-workers in the nightmarish conditions that
prevailed on these new estates, despite all the pressure exerted by the
colonial state. The British therefore had to draw on its reserve army of
labour in India, to man its lucrative new outpost to the south. An infamous
system of contract labour was established, which transported hundreds of
thousands of Tamil ‘coolies’ from southern India into Sri Lanka for the coffee
estates. These Tamils labourers died in tens of thousands both on the
journey itself as well as on the plantations.

The coffee economy collapsed in the 1870s, when coffee blight ravaged the
plantations, but the economic system it had created survived intact into the
era of its successor, tea which was introduced on a wide scale from 1880
onwards.

Tea was more capital-intensive and needed a higher volume of initial

investment to be processed, so that individual estate-owners were now
supplanted by large English consolidated companies based either in London
(‘sterling firms’) or Colombo (‘rupee firms’). Monoculture was thus
increasingly capped by monopoly within the plantation economy.

The pattern thus created in the 19th century remained in existence down to
1972. The only significant modification to the colonial economy was the
addition of a rubber sector in the mid-country areas. A new body of urban
capitalists was growing in the low country, around shop-keeping and the
alcohol and wood-work industries. These entrepreneurs were from many
castes and they strongly resented the historically unprecedented and
unbuddhistic practice of ‘caste discrimination’ adopted by the Siam Nikaya in
1764, just 10 years after it had been established by a Thai monk. Around
1800 they organised the Amarapura Nikaya, which became hegemonic in the
low-country by the mid-19th century.

The British attempt at giving a Protestant Christian education to the young

men of the commercial classes backfired, as they transformed the Buddhism
practised in Sri Lanka into something resembling the non-conformist
Protestant model. A series of debates against clergymen of the established
Anglican church was organised, culminating in the defeat of the latter by
modern logical argument.

The Buddhist revival was aided by the Theosophists, led by American Col.
Henry Steel Olcott, who helped establish Buddhist schools such as Ananda
College, Colombo; Dharmaraja College, Kandy; Maliyadeva College,
Kurunegala; Mahinda College, Galle;and Musaeus College, Colombo; at the
same time injecting more modern secular western ideas into the ‘Protestant’
Buddhist thoughtstream.