Slave in a Palanquin
COLONIAL SE RVITUDE AND RESISTANCE IN SRI LANKA
Nira WickramasingheImage
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The stage needs to be set, and it is a large swathe of land and sea that we traverse. Enslaved people moved; they were forcibly transported across the Indian Ocean, as testified to by the lives of the men and women involved in the murder of the fiscal of Colombo in 1723, related in chapter 1, or by the life of a woman enslaved in Galle, described in chapter 2. Although the book centers on the maritime provinces of the island, the predomi- nantly Sinhalese South and the predominantly Tamil North, other places across the sea surreptitiously enter the frame. The history of enslaved peo- ple cannot be divorced from the histories of other places, the places these people came from or where they went. In this sense the book is not con- fined to the boundaries of the island but is inserted in a wider territorial and oceanic loop.
From the seventeenth century, the port cities of Colombo and Galle, which served as transit points for enslaved people from South India and Southeast Asia and within the VOC shipping network, were second in importance only to Batavia. The bureaucracy of shipping has thus yielded a first type of data that comes to us from shipping lists and logbooks of ship captains. Colonial officials kept records of all the ships, passengers, and cargo that entered and left ports under their control.8 It has been esti- mated, for instance, that four ships a year would depart from the Dutch Republic to Sri Lanka, and up to fifteen a year navigated from Sri Lanka to the republic, with a halt at the Cape. The port settlements of Sri Lanka were, moreover, crucial spaces where ships called en route between the Western and Eastern Indian Oceans.9 The traffic between the Coroman- del Coast and Colombo was far greater still: in 1705–1706, 103 boats sailed into Colombo. Colombo was in the path of the southwest monsoon and hence, unlike Batavia, was not a key port for company ships. It thus had to share much of the shipping traffic with Galle in the South and Jaffna in the North.10
During the wars that pitted France against other European powers
between 1792 and 1815, Britain acquired the Indian Ocean territories of Sri Lanka, Mauritius, and the Cape Colony.11 Britain was then the largest of the Europe-based empires and had been the dominant slave-trading country among them since the seventeenth century. During this transi- tional imperial period, debates in the British Parliament about abolishing the slave trade and related plans to ameliorate or reform the condition of
the empire’s slaves were chiefly concerned with British sugar colonies in the West Indies. India, still under East India Company rule, remained until the late 1830s conspicuously absent from the abolitionist debate. As Andrea Major convincingly argues, “Not all slaveries were considered equal.”12 Parliament made the slave trade illegal in 1807, and by the 1820s and 1830s an increasingly globalized antislavery movement was fiercely debating the legitimacy of “property in men” and the idea of payment of compensation to slaveholders in exchange for the freedom of their slaves. The culmination of these debates in Britain was a compromise: the Slav- ery Abolition Act of August 28, 1833, provided for the award of twenty million pounds sterling to the owners of “slave property” in the British colonies but exempted Sri Lanka, St. Helena, and the territories under East India Company rule, such as India.13 The delegalization of slavery in India that occurred in 1843 thus had no provisions compelling local elites to enforce it, and enslaved people were not informed of their new status.14
https://inclusivehuman.org/sri-lanka-pallar-forced-labor/
/Sri Lanka/Pallar/Forced Labor
Country: Sri Lanka
Group: Pallar
Date Finalized: 1 April 2023
Team: Noelle Collings (lead), Juwairiah Afridi, Anthony Un, Ash Pessaran, Hannah Lux, Stefania Lavadao
Content Warning: Slavery, Colonization, Violence
Approximate Time Period: 1658-1844
The Sri Lankan Pallar are an agricultural caste belonging to the larger Tamil caste, located in Northern and Eastern Sri Lanka. The Dutch colonized Sri Lanka in the late 17th century. The Dutch East India Company (active 1602-1799) trafficked and taxed the import of enslaved individuals. In the early 19th Century, the Dutch attempted to codify their view of Tamil law (Wickramasinghe & Schrikker 2019). In doing so, the Dutch reorganized the caste system, classifying the Pallars as ‘unfree’ and ‘untouchable’, which led them into forced, bonded servitude (Wickramasinghe 2020). Alongside the Dutch, the higher Tamil castes, such as the Vellalar, forced the Pallars to work as their agricultural and domestic servants (Silva et al. 2009). The East India Company, based on Dutch Law, was entitled to “…one out of five or six children—boys and girls—born of the marriage between a Nalavar or Pallar slave owned by the Company and a slave woman from the countryside” (Wickramasinghe & Schrikker 2019). Slavery was legally abolished in Sri Lanka in 1844. However, ‘coerced’ labor took its place (Wickramasinghe 2020). It is difficult to assess the degree of discrimination the Pallar are currently facing, primarily because the caste system itself comes with implicit bias. There is some evidence that many members of the Pallar do not have access to safe water, electricity, or proper education (Joshua Project, 2023). The Sinhalese and Tamils engaged in armed conflict in the Sri Lankan Civil War (1983-2009), which is thought to have been caused by both ethnic tensions and the effects of British imperialism (Anandakugan 2020). Due to this conflict, many Sri Lankans, especially those of lower castes, were displaced , but there is no evidence of current forced labor (Silva et al. 2009).
Data Quality: The data quality is a ⅓, because there is little information on the Pallars as a caste on its own.
Sources:
- Anandakugan, N. (2020). The Sri Lankan War and its history, revisited in 2020. Harvard International Review. https://hir.harvard.edu/sri-lankan-civil-war/
- Joshua Project. (2023). Pallan (Hindu traditions) in Sri Lanka. Retrieved from https://joshuaproject.net/people_groups/17886/CE
- Schrikker, A. & Wickramasinghe, N. (2019). The ambivalence of freedom: Slaves in Jaffna, Sri Lanka, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The Journal of Asian Studies, 78(3), 497-519. https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/0DA019FA2028635360498C72E37FDE21/S0021911819000159a.pdf/the-ambivalence-of-freedom-slaves-in-jaffna-sri-lanka-in-the-eighteenth-and-nineteenth-centuries.pdf
- Silva, K. T., Sivapragasam, P. P., & Thanges, P. (2009). Casteless or caste-blind?: Dynamics of concealed caste discrimination, social exclusion, and protest in Sri Lanka. International Dalit Solidarity Network.
- Wickramasinghe, N. (2020). Slave in a Palanquin: Colonial servitude and resistance in Sri Lanka. Columbia University Press.
By comparison, the early dismantling of slavery in the crown colony of
Ceylon from 1816 and other forms of experimentation in land tenure, labor, taxation, and trade were quite unlike the Indian situation. At the time the Colebrooke-Cameron Commission was sent to the island in 1828, mainly to explore new forms of productivity and address the continuing deficit in the revenue of the colony, a number of changes, including the dismantling of coerced labor, had already been set in motion.15 Legal scholars have recently identified, for instance, an earlier report, the “Ceylon Calendar of 1821,” as a key testimony of “the new administrative focus” that sig- naled the emergence of novel social and political arrangements.16 Further- ing this endeavor, which charts a genealogy of modernity that predates the Colebrooke-Cameron reforms, in the present work I introduce a modi- fied perspective on social change insofar as my concern is with “state effects,” in particular the way mundane material practices of the state acted on subaltern people in the decades preceding the Colebrooke-Cameron Report.17
A Singular Story
In 1815—the year in which the British conquered the interior kingdom of Kandy—the entire island came under colonial rule for the first time. At
this time there were three areas in Sri Lanka where slavery was still in prac- tice: the maritime provinces formerly controlled by the Portuguese and the Dutch East India Company and under British East India Company rule between 1796 and 1802; the Jaffna peninsula; and the Kandyan areas in the central highlands, where categories of slaves were described in the Kan- dyan treatise of law, the Niti-Nighanduwa. Before the arrival of the Euro- peans, slavery had been practiced in the north-central and southern areas of the island during the Anuradhapura period (fourth century BCE to elev- enth century CE) and the Polonnaruwa period (eleventh century CE to fourteenth century CE) in conjunction with public institutions such as Buddhist temples, royal households, and guilds. Families of slaves are clearly listed in records such as the Galapata-vihara inscription (twelfth to thir- teenth centuries).18
This book focuses on the southern and northern maritime provinces, which came under colonial rule as early as the sixteenth century, and does not cover the special case of slavery in the Kandyan provinces. The Kan- dyan kingdom, the last independent kingdom, survived for another two centuries and finally succumbed to the British in 1818, after a widespread rebellion of the Kandyan aristocracy. Enslavement in the Kandyan prov- inces was often voluntary, as people sold themselves into slavery to settle a debt or obtain a loan and were then subject to the customary Kandyan law.19
In the southern areas, the enslaved people who worked in Dutch or local homes as servants or artisans more often hailed from South India or the East Indies. This was quite different to the situation in the north of the island, where the enslaved were Tamils from oppressed castes. There, by sanctioning and tapping into a perceived local practice of slavery and legally constituting them as slaves, Dutch colonial rulers had further strengthened the power of the dominant caste Vellalars over their subordinates.20 This was done through bureaucratizing processes of registration, legal codifica- tion, and litigation. While the Dutch transformed an existing form of bond- age in the Tamil areas, creating a slavery that looked much more like European slavery, British rule introduced a number of measures, acts, and incentives from 1816 to dismantle slavery as it was practiced in the entire island. The present volume follows the lives of a few enslaved people as they were touched by these changes and at moments when they challenged their condition. A slave who rode the palanquin of his master in Nallur, Jaffna, epitomizes this moment of upheaval.
Sri Lanka was an anomaly that resembled neither the Indian subconti- nent nor other Indian Ocean islands. Its forms of enslavement were linked to the Dutch creation of a form of slavery resembling European slavery through a transformation of caste in the Hindu North, to debt in the Kan- dyan areas, and to Portuguese and Dutch needs for domestic and agricul- tural labor in the southern maritime territories. They were a mélange of Indian Malabar Coast praedial caste-based forms of slavery and Cape Col- ony’s racialized forms of servitude. If slavers were not always “white,” in the Cape the enslaved were never other than “black.” The variety of slave systems and forms of bondage is such that it cannot be easily encapsulated in terms such as “South Asian slavery” or “Sri Lankan slavery.”21 It may not be useful to include, as has been done in some recent studies, quite disparate forms of servitude, from palace women in the Chola Empire, to Turks in the army of the Delhi sultans, to indebted peasants in western India, in the catchall category “South Asia.” Thinking of the multiple genealogies and modes of exerting power over another’s body could be a productive approach. Furthermore, there is a need to treat with caution an implicit idea among some scholars working on Indian forms of slavery that South Asian / Indian slavery works through intimacy and kinship ties.22 This view is challenged inter alia by Matthias van Rossum’s recent work on slavery in Cochin, which is based on a detailed analysis of VOC archives.23 For insight into the intertwined history of freedom and unfree- dom and the need to address them as entangled in the common history of capital, one may need to go back to Gyan Prakash’s masterful demonstra- tion of the reconstitution by British rule in nineteenth-century Bihar of a range of dependent labor ties in the inverse image of free labor. His work shows that after the abolition of slavery in 1843, the Kamias, enslaved agri- cultural laborers in Bihar, were transformed into bonded laborers. They became free but enslaved by debt.24 Freedom is clearly a misleading antith- esis to slavery. There is no easy or single definition of slavery in Sri Lanka, where the bundle of traits of Western slavery are rarely visible. Orlando Patterson’s definition of slavery as “the permanent, violent domination of natally alienated and generally dishonoured persons” may apply to some but not all domestic slaves working in the port cities of the island.25 But it does not fit, in any sense, the situation in the northern province where the enslaved Nalavars, Pallars, and Coviyars had a sense of belonging to the land where they lived and worked. Igor Kopytoff’s identification of slav- ery as the “legitimate exercise of a bundle of different rights over another
person” by slaveholders may be more fruitfully applied to the northern maritime province.26
Sri Lanka became in many ways a testing ground for the British gov- ernment through its representative, the governor, that set in motion processes to gradually abolish slavery as soon as the island came under its control after the interlude of East India Company rule between 1796 and 1802. In the decades that followed, acts of gradual emancipation of slaves were passed and official pronouncements made regarding the need to free slaves. These decades have been referred to as a period of amelioration of slavery when the ideas of the antislavery lobby in Parliament and the Evan- gelical movement threw their weight behind the forces of emancipation. West Indian planters responded by introducing some policies to mitigate the blatant abuses inherent in slavery through distribution of food and clothing and conversion through the medium of education and religion. This amelioration policy met with much derision on the part of abolition- ists who did not see it as a path to emancipation.27 Sri Lanka’s experience with abolition bears many common features of amelioration practices in other crown colonies and is for this reason singularly distinct from the subcontinent.
The Descent Into the Ordinary
The lives of dominated people, in the singular—lives of trouble, chance, nerve, and ruse—make the matter of this book, which takes the shape of a “descent into the ordinary.”28 It does not strive to create a vast tapestry but rather to look at the “epic of the ordinary” formed by oblique align- ments and tangential engagements that took place in the shadow of the grand dramas recounted by historians.29 It relates individual stories of enslaved people who were moved from the Malay world and the Indian subcontinent to Sri Lanka and whose lives were captured and recorded by colonial archiving because they stepped out of line at a particular moment. Meghan Vaughan’s portraits of enslaved men and women in Mauritius, Marina Carter’s exploration of life experiences of indentured workers, and, more recently, Clare Anderson’s meticulous retracing of the lives of convicts have considerably enriched our understanding of the lives of subaltern people in the nineteenth century across the Indian Ocean.30 Ably researched works by Kerry Ward, Ronit Ricci, and Michael Laffan
have recently followed the journeys of Southeast Asian exiles and con- victs between Java, Cape Colony, and Sri Lanka.31 A rich and well- established historiography on slavery in the Cape of Good Hope has yielded fascinating stories of enslaved people, parts of whose lives appeared in the VOC archive. This happened at moments of crisis or conflict when it was necessary for them to be recorded.32 Nigel Worden’s sharp obser- vation that “slaves survived in the paper archive by default rather than by design” is reflected in the Sri Lankan archive too.33 More recently, Sue Peabody’s master-slave narrative of Madeleine, a woman sold into slavery in the 1760s in Chandernagor, and her son Furcy explores the paradoxes of what it meant to be a slave and then free in the Mascarene Islands. The changes in fortune that were bequeathed to Furcy, a man who was born a slave and then became a bourgeois head of household and a slaveholder himself, would have happened to others too.34
Historians writing on Sri Lanka’s colonial past have rarely focused their attention on the lives and practices of subaltern men and women who did not keep journals or diaries, and if they wrote letters they did it with the help of a petition writer. On the other hand, accounts of the trials and tri- umphs of exceptional figures, politicians, and rulers by professional and public historians are numerous. In Sri Lankan historiography, the realm of the popular is seen as made of a collective, rather than of individuals endowed with names and faces. Studies of popular collective revolts, move- ments, and political parties rarely turn to the singular except to linger briefly on leaders of these movements.35 The margins have had a different meaning for feminist historians who have created a corpus that has unearthed the extraordinary lives of exceptional women in conditions of adversity: medical practitioners, suffragettes, trade union leaders. Yet all belonged to privileged literate backgrounds and left a trail of paper sources for feminist historians to document.36 Historians of labor have turned to communities of work: plantation labor on coffee or tea plantations and, more recently, in garment factories or migrant workers as a collective rather than focusing on individual lives.37 The individual is conspicuously absent from the historiography of the nineteenth century unless the subject is royal, heroic, or villainous.38
Works of historical and cultural anthropology ranging from later Annales
historians’ studies of revolt to the seminal Indian historiography on peas- ant resistance were inspiring and helped me think about modes of reading and representing violence.39 Together with the Annales and Subaltern
studies’ decoding of counterinsurgency discourse, my debt is to the lumi- nous work of Veena Das on victims of violence, with its reading of silences and recomposition of people’s lives.40 There has been little attention given to enslaved peoples in nineteenth-century Sri Lanka and especially to their connection to other places in the Indian Ocean world. So while I draw from familiar forms of history writing, I explore an uncharted archive that allows new subject matter and vantage points. This book aims to deepen an engagement with areas and people who have been over- looked by the dominant historiography.
It is a historian’s lament that people from India, Indonesia, or Sri Lanka who were enslaved in the Indian Ocean world between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries have produced, to my knowledge, only a few autobiographies, in contrast to the rich body of works on the Atlantic world. Among them is the little-known, unpublished memoir of Wange van Balie, which describes his life as an enslaved person in the Indonesian Archipelago.41 The fifty-nine pages handwritten by van Balie, who was emancipated in the Netherlands after following his final master there, is unique in many ways. He describes his youth on a farm on the island of Magarij, his subsequent enslavement, and life under various masters until 1810. Paul Bijl interprets the manuscript as the performance of “acts of equality” by the author. He argues that van Balie wrote the text to engage with his Dutch readers and claim his equality as an autonomous human being who had the capacity to empathize. Slaves appear as actors in a few other texts. The life of Untung Surapati, the “national hero of Indonesia,” born in the late seventeenth century as a slave in Bali, is recounted in Javanese historical poems or ballads. The Mughal Punjab eighteenth-century manuscript Kitab-i-Qissa-I Tahmas Miskin was writ- ten in Persian by an ex-slave. Its author, Tahmas Miskin, a young boy from a village called Barzat in Turkey, was forcefully taken during a raid by Persian soldiers.42 Din Muhammad, who worked in the East India Company’s Bengal army and followed his former master to Cork in the mid-eighteenth century, wrote an autobiography in which his past as a slave in a British household during a time of famine is occluded.43
Apart from these rare examples, the Indian Ocean world lacks the genre
of literature now known as “slave narratives” or “freedom narratives” that accounts for the lives of African slaves in North America and the Carib- bean from capture to emancipation. There are a few Arabic-language
narratives of slave experience, such as that of Abu Bakr of Timbuktu, in bondage in Jamaica, and some narratives of liberated Africans, the most famous being that of Samuel Ajayi Crowther, who was rescued from a slave ship by the British Navy and resettled in Sierra Leone.44 These are rare, however, compared to the corpus written by formerly enslaved people in North America and the Caribbean, which includes the canonical writ- ings of Harriet Tubman, Harriet Jacobs, Frederick Douglass, and Olaudah Equiano. These texts are invaluable sources to understand capture, enslavement, transportation, and finally emancipation. Yet while they strive to speak from the perspective of the enslaved, many of them remain texts that were edited by prominent abolitionists for use in their antislav- ery campaigns.45 Written in autobiographical and sociological modes for a primarily white and female readership, they were constrained by the demands placed on them by their main sponsor and consumer, the aboli- tionist movement, which wanted texts that were written in a specific style and sounded “truthful and believable.”46
By contrast, the texts that pepper the colonial archive—petitions, testi-
monies of slaves, and letters about them—are not compelled to show a visible sign of reason or a shared humanity. They come to us mediated, partially recorded, and drawing on different types of conventions and tropes. These texts that document performances of enslaved people are not produced to prove the humanity and personhood of slaves but stage them at the center of events where their own claim for recognition comes to the fore.47 Thus, in spite of a lack of personal accounts such as slave diaries, autobiographies, letters, and stories, there is an alternative in judicial records when they have been preserved. Legal cases have often become a mainstay of cultural history, despite being mediated and translated records where the historian performs the role of a sleuth who investigates events that are incomplete or subject to the vagaries of memory.48
An Archive of Practices, Names, and Numbers
My strategy is to capture the slave at the moment he or she acts and per- forms, thus relating a slice of his or her life. Rather than focusing only on utterances, I forge an archive of practices, of people doing things, these things being precisely what allowed them to enter the archive. The texts I
read at the National Archives and British Library in London, the Sri Lanka National Archives in Colombo, and the National Archive in The Hague are a variety of documents: petitions by enslaved or formerly enslaved peo- ple claiming justice and dignity; court records where the enslaved appear as witnesses, victims, or accused culpable of transgressions, hence reported in the official legal apparatus; notarial records where enslaved people receive largesse from their proprietors. I read in these texts heroic gestures by ordi- nary men and women that could be qualified as a politics of resistance to a status quo or simply as evidence of the emergence of the “political” in men and women who were confronted with situations where they refused to accept the terms set for them by society.49 There are, however, many things that we cannot know from a hostile archive. Stories take us down false trails and dead-ends. I have therefore tried to force the archive in search of discards, dissonances, and anomalies.
For each story of an enslaved person in the north and south of the island, another important source of information is the slave register, an enumera- tive procedure that took place in the nineteenth century as an outcome of the movement to abolish slavery in the British Empire. Slave registers on Sri Lanka, a series of large, hand-filled, bound books, have not until now been exploited as a historical source.50 In Sri Lanka as in other colonies, measures were taken to ensure that proprietors duly registered their slaves. Although this operation was not designed to count slaves, it is an enumera- tion of a specific sort. The slave registers listing enslaved people in the island of Sri Lanka were created in 1818–1832 and are today at the National Archives in London. They provide information not exclusively about slaves, listed alphabetically in each parish or district, but also about proprietors. In 1819 the Office for the Registry of Colonial Slaves was established in London, and copies of the slave registers kept by the colonies were sent to this office. Registration generally occurred once every three years. The reg- isters continued through to 1834, when slavery was officially abolished in most territories, but in the case of Sri Lanka registration continued until 1844—the year in which the crown colony abolished slavery. These later registers are visible only in pieces in the correspondence of collectors and have not survived as complete documents.51 Registers tabulate names of enslaved individuals, number each of them, and list them in columns. They provide some interesting information for the maritime provinces: date of registration, name of slave, sex, age, name of children of female slaves, age and sex of children.52 Thus, although they deal with the “collective,” the
registers of enslaved people prove themselves to be extremely useful to frame the individual stories this book relates.
This book is organized around six core questions. The first five chapters braid individual stories of enslaved people within a broader theme—race and blackness, bodily violence, caste and slavery, free and unfree labor, the performance of freedom. The final chapter reflects on the way slavery haunts the present, how it reverberates while adopting different disguises, and tries to understand for whose benefit slavery is invisible or invoked.
The first chapter begins with the story of the murder of a Dutch fiscal in 1723 and its afterlives to explore the gradual blackening of slaves in texts and in the collective memory of the people of Sri Lanka. It details the rewriting of history around the space called “Slave Island” in Colombo, where a murder by Indonesian slaves gets transformed into a Kaffir slave revolt in popular memory and guidebooks. I then turn my attention to the census and Blue Books of the first half of the nineteenth century, the main administrative documents where the “slave” was mentioned as a collective category and, ironically in a colony where the majority of people were under British colonial rule, contrasted with “free” black subjects. This chapter explores the social and political conditions that produced these recorded taxonomies and the political and moral projects that were served by the appearance and disappearance of certain categories of classification. Chapter 2 follows four enslaved people in the southern part of the island, from Colombo to Galle, as they appear in the fissures of an archive of law and violence. Violence is present in its multiple and cruelest forms in the burdened life of an enslaved woman, Selestina, who kills her newborn child in 1820; in the murder of an enslaved man, Valentine, running away from servitude on a Maradana Road; in a woman from Cochin sold in Galle; and in a child in Galle kidnapped as merchandise for the Arabian slave mar- ket. In all four cases one gets a glimpse of people’s refusal to accept the terms set: infanticide as protest, flight interrupted by murder, appeals to colonial justice all signal a clear desire for moving out of enslavement or
the conditions that come with it.
Chapter 3 begins with an event: in 1819 in Jaffna, a Coviyar slave named Cander Wayreven was whipped under orders of the collector of Jaffna, the highest British official in the area, for traveling in the palanquin of his mas- ter and thus going against what was conceived as the prevailing law by allegedly overstepping his position and status. Wayreven’s case and others
too reveal that in spite of the ambivalence displayed by British officials in Sri Lanka to defend and uphold antislavery and proabolition policies initi- ated in the metropole since the beginning of the nineteenth century, small spaces of resistance were opening in Jaffna society in many different and unusual ways. This murmur of British liberalism’s rejection of slavery gave enslaved peoples the psychological thrust to act.
The Chilaw experiment in slave emancipation related in chapter 4 began in 1820 as a prelude to better-known experiments in freeing labor in the British West Indian colonies. It seemingly applied a simple rule: freedom in exchange for labor. According to this scheme, hundreds of Coviyar, Nalavar, and Pallar slaves from Jaffna whose freedom was purchased by the colonial government were sent to Chilaw in the southwestern part of the island in the early decades of British rule to perform hard labor on canals and other public works. Through a reconstruction of the lives of these emancipated slaves in Chilaw, the chapter demonstrates that modernity and liberal thought were ever present in the procedures informing the gradual abolition of slavery, decades before the Colebrooke-Cameron reforms.
Chapter 5 is a detailed exposé of the revolt of an emancipated slave in Colombo in 1826. Packier Pulle Rawothan, a resident of Colombo, applied to the headmoorman (headman of the Muslims) of the district to obtain permission for his son to be circumcised.53 Some members of the Moor (Muslim) community of Colombo reacted angrily to this request, spawn- ing a war of reports, petitions, and complaints, culminating in a court case filed by Rawothan in the provincial court of Colombo against eight mem- bers of the Moor community.54 The issue was simply that Rawothan was “of slave extraction,” castigated as “a cooly and the son of a maid slave of Pakkeer Pulle” and thus not eligible to perform “such honorary ceremo- nies the respectable Moors are only entitled to perform.” The thirty-two handwritten pages filed in the records of the Colombo kachcheri exist as a testimony of the legitimate strategies of claim making that were available to and used with some confidence by disgruntled subjects of the colony, exemplifying that the crown colony was not dissimilar to what has been aptly called the “Document Raj” across the Palk Straits.55
The final chapter explores the eclipse of enslaved people from the col-
lective memory of people in Sri Lanka. After slavery was abolished in 1844, how and why did enslaved people become invisible in the North and the South? The main form of forgetfulness was the willingness to accept a layer of memories that conflated slavery with “Kaffirs” or Africans. But there
were also various mechanisms in the Sinhalese-majority South—conversion, baptism, appropriation of “ethnic” (Portuguese Burgher) identity or of a labor identity (coolie)—that may have contributed to the complete disap- pearance of traces of slavery. In the North, among dominant Tamils, invis- ibility is a symptom of a refusal to remember a difficult past shared by enslaved people and slaveholders.
CHAPTER I
A Dutch Fiscal’s Murder
Interrogating the Identity of Slaves, Blacks, and “Kaffirs”
The documents we read were not written for us.
— MARTIN A. KLEIN 1
There is an enduring belief in Sri Lanka that at some undetermined point in history “Kaffir” slaves rebelled, creating such havoc in Colombo that it led to them being severely suppressed and then confined to a ward of the city that then became known for posterity as Slave Island. The less well-known murder of the Dutch fiscal, Barent van der Swaan, and his wife by their Asian domestic slaves in Colombo in 1723 is intimately connected to this apocryphal story.2 The reverberations of this violent event across three centuries offer a key to tracking shifts in the man- ner in which “slaves,” “blacks,” and “Kaffirs” were represented and their lives and deaths recorded during successive colonial and postcolonial
regimes.
The term “Kaffir,” from the Portuguese word caffre, is borrowed, accord- ing to the Encyclopaedia of Islam, from the Arabic kafir, which originally meant obliterating or covering in verses in the Qur’an and later acquired the more general meaning of infidel or nonbeliever.3 It remains today as Kapiri in Sinhala and Kapili in Tamil, to qualify present-day Afro–Sri Lankans whose ancestors were believed to have been forcefully brought to the island as slaves and mercenaries by the Portuguese from various parts of the African continent. Exact lineages are difficult to trace as one has to rely on facts and figures given in colonial sources and vernacular literary works, where the strength, ferocity, and numbers of the enemy forces are
[ 16 ]
often exaggerated in descriptions of battles. One can only assume that early Africans would have merged, over centuries, into the local population. African soldiers were brought to fight in the British Army during the Kan- dyan campaign in the nineteenth century. Records show that they were slaves purchased by the British in Goa and Bombay and brought to the island to be trained as soldiers. They served as free men in the Caffre Corps, later called the Third and Fourth Ceylon Regiment.4 Some Afro– Sri Lankans who today form a distinct community in Puttalam claim to be descendants of those soldiers from the Third Ceylon Regiment who were given land to settle on after retirement. Others believe their ances- tors came from Kaffa in Ethiopia.5 This book, however, is not about the Kaffirs, who are commonly seen as an ethnographically distinct commu- nity associated with slavery and empire, but about enslaved people whose ambiguous origins take us to an interconnected Indian Ocean world made of a crucible of peoples from India, Sri Lanka, the East Indies, and Africa, men and women who shared a similar fate.
I suggest in this chapter that a metamorphosis happened in popular cul- ture in the form of a gradual “blackening” of the slave in texts and in the collective memory of the people of Sri Lanka from the mid-nineteenth cen- tury onward through a merging of two initially distinct colonial catego- ries of “slave” and “black.” This led to an erasure of the diversity of the origin of enslaved people and the equivalence of slave with African, a bias that academic history has until now failed to address.6 The history of men and women who were forcefully brought to Sri Lanka from the East Indies and India disappeared, replaced by a new, simplified history of slavery in Sri Lanka conceived as black/African (Kaffir) slavery that resonated with the dominant model of Atlantic slavery.
Another semantic phenomenon that has occurred in many places where violent colonial encounters shattered societies and touched Sri Lanka equally is the shift over time in the meaning of “black” and “blackness.” The meaning of the former term shriveled, shifting from an amorphous one of conquest in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries to one endowed with a sharp racial undertone, alongside the growth of racialized ideas about indigenous “oriental” peoples. In Sri Lanka until 1838, “blacks” encom- passed Sinhalese, Tamils, Muslims, and other nonwhites. Blackness, like race, had no scientific pretensions until the late nineteenth century, as it was most often used as a category of classification in the early censuses and
as a term of inferiority cast on all dominated peoples who simply looked different from the norm, the white male. Achille Mbembe reminds us of Frantz Fanon’s famous point that just as the figure of the black does not exist, neither does the white, both being fantasies of the imagination.7 The white was indeed little more than a fantasy of the European imagination that the West tried to naturalize and universalize. Yet ironically, while a century earlier blackness was forcefully contained in a racialized African identity, in the twentieth century blackness would free itself to become a radical claim and rallying point for political solidarity among peoples of African and Asian descent.8
This chapter begins with a foray into a hitherto unexplored event, the murder of a Dutch fiscal in eighteenth-century Colombo, in order to understand the processes at stake in the recording and memorialization of enslaved people. What details are recorded and emphasized for posterity, and what is left out? I trace the fractured journey of the categories of slave, black, and Kaffir and inquire into the political and moral projects that were served by the resilience, disappearance, and metamorphosis of slaves and blacks in the nineteenth century. After piecing together existing data on the murder of 1723 and its afterlives, I explore the few sources that provide clues to the origin of slaves in the southern maritime region of the island and finally trace the journeys of the categories “slave” and “black” in the official colonial record.
A Murder in 1723
Let us begin with the events recorded in recent popular guidebooks and travel writings that are purported to have happened in Slave Island, today a ward of Colombo, the capital city of Sri Lanka. Slave Island (fig. 1.1) is located directly south of the fort area, between the Colombo harbor and Beira Lake, where once stood a fortress built by the Portuguese and the Dutch as the center of power. The account written in 1984 by the reputed surveyor R. L. Brohier of the growth of the Kaffir slave population in Colombo and their violent rebellion remains the most detailed. Yet one searches in vain for archival sources or precise dates that sustain his story. Most present explanations of the events are found in popular writings that draw generously from Brohier’s account, often failing to cite its author.
[ 18 ] A DUTCH FISC AL’S MURDER
Since he is considered reliable and has produced such a trail of followers, his rendering of the events needs to be cited at length:
The Kaffirs were trafficked from the East coast of Africa in the neigh- bourhood of Mozambique . . . they were used as mercenary troops, camp fellows and carriers. The Portuguese introduced the Kaffir to Ceylon about the year 1630 from their settlement at Goa on the coast of Malabar. The Dutch drew largely on this pool of labour to work under the overseers when they set out to build the citadel at Colombo.9
In Brohier’s account, slaves found in Sri Lanka’s southern maritime prov- ince were clearly and unambiguously Africans, who had been forcibly brought from Mozambique through Goa, the capital of the Portuguese viceroyalty in India. Furthermore, the momentous events leading to the death of the fiscal, Barent van der Swaan, are depicted as something much larger than a murder, since the language Brohier used is one of a large- scale slave insurrection and a conspiracy:
In the early years of the 18th century the Kaffir population of Colombo had grown to such numbers that it gave them a sense of their own strength. This enabled them to stage an insurrection in the citadel. Besides committing much violence in the streets to private property, they conspired and murdered the Fiscal, Barent van der Swaan, and his good wife, when they lay asleep. The details of the tragedy hold that the murderer, a Kaffir servant, had hidden under the bedstead, and when his master and mistress had turned into sleep crawled out behind them and using a dagger “with two unerring stabs sent them to eternity.” Eventually the Kaffir Insurrection was suppressed. The authorities thereafter decided that all the slave-labour working in the citadel must be regimented.10
Reading through Brohier’s account, it seemed to me curious that a slave insurrection of presumably large numbers of African slaves would go unno- ticed or at least unreported by generations of professional historians who have written on Dutch rule in Sri Lanka.11 Furthermore the peculiar mix of vagueness (the absence of dates) and precision in the form of exact details (the dagger, the bedstead) in Brohier’s telling belongs more to the realm of
myth than to that of professional history. Curiosity pushed me into hunt- ing for answers through a foray into a Dutch VOC archive that I was quite unfamiliar with. Colleagues recommended looking at the criminal case records in the form of criminal rolls of the period. The dating of the events was made possible by the conjuncture of the death of Governor Isaac Augustin Rumpf, which secondary sources confirmed as happening in June 1723. Rumpf ’s funeral account by Francois Valentijn, published a few years later, did not make any reference to a large-scale “Kaffir” insurrec- tion, although it did mention the unrest caused by cinnamon peelers that same year: “In this year the cinnamon peelers rose against us Also in
this year (1723) a rare event occurred when the fiscal, Barent van der Swaan, with his wife, was murdered by his slaves, unfortunately, in Colombo. Upon hearing this, his hon. passed away three days later, on the 11 of June 1723 (so people say) he died out of shock.”12
Interestingly, an account by R. G. Anthonisz, the government archi- vist, from 1906 tallies with Valentijn’s record of the event. Anthonisz writes that Rumpf, governor from 1716 to 1723, died suddenly from “a shock received on hearing of the assassination of the Fiscal Barent van der Swaan and his wife by their slaves.”13 He does not mention any instance of a slave rebellion.
Distinct, braided, and parallel narratives appear to have emerged after the event. One that describes the event as a murder committed by domes- tic slaves, followed by the death of the governor evident after 1723, fades away as we move into the twentieth century, leaving some traces, as in a recent online resource that draws from uncited sources to explain the naming of Slave Island: “One night a slave of a Dutch household in the Fort had murdered an entire family. As a result all the slaves in the Fort were lodged in huts just outside the Kasteel or Fort The slaves, after
carrying water, firewood, and attending to janitorial work in the house- holds in the Fort, were at the end of the day rowed to Slave Island every evening through steps of the Sally Port.”14 The narrative that came into existence in the nineteenth century about a murder and a rebellion of Kaffir slaves has spawned multiple avatars in contemporary popular culture.
The criminal rolls of 1723, however, do not refer to widespread distur- bances or any other violent context and only give us a picture of the object of the court case, namely, the deaths of Barent van der Swaan and his wife, which are noted as horrific (gruvelijk). For the crime committed, twelve
enslaved people, described as “slaves of van der Swaan,” were taken pris- oner and charged in court for murder. Their names and ages are listed:
1. Kedoe 23 to 24 years
2. Scipio 22, 23
3. Lotty 19, 18
4. Wintura 26, 28
5. Titus 26
6. Tenna 24
7. Rake 22
8. Rande 20
9. Cong 17
10. Dana 12, 13
11. Clona 30, 31
12. Rosetta 12, 13
The most revealing information given is about the place of origin of these slaves (lijfeigenen), which was scribbled under their names. Con- trary to the common perception of African/Kaffir slaves being involved in the violence, the fourth-named Wintura and seventh, Rake, were “Balinese” and “Christian,” while others were “born on the island of Timor and heathen (together) slaves.”15 VOC sources suggest quite cat- egorically that those involved in the violence were not Kaffirs. Thus by the late twentieth century, when Brohier wrote his seemingly authorita- tive book on Colombo, the origin of the slaves had undergone a meta- morphosis, from East Indies, Balinese, and Timorese to a new identity as “Kaffirs.”
The term “Kaffir” (nonbeliever in Arabic), used by Arab slavers to refer to indigenous people of East, Central, and West Africa, was adopted by European colonizers to qualify various people from Africa and was never applied in Sri Lanka to people of Asian origin. Asian slaves appear in Dutch textual records under the generic term slaaven, while Africans are included in both the “slaaven” and “Kaffir” categories. The discrepancy between the story as it is recorded in the official VOC archive and its appearance in a new garb in a variety of published texts over three centuries brings to bear an unambiguous process of blackening of slaves. Blackening stains seeped into travel writing, contemporary popular histories, and public cul- ture, leading to an overall loss of the complexity and historicity of the
categories “slave” and “black” and at the same time a loss of a compassion- ate memory of slavery, an issue I will come back to in the final chapter.
Historical truths are understood here and sought out as “broad synthetic generalizations based on researched collections of individual facts. They may be wrong, but they are always amenable to verification by the methods of historical research.”16 What is significant to uncover as a historical endeavor is the way the Slave Island story and the origin of its protagonists acquired new meanings, as the events moved from the cloisters of academia epitomized by Anthonisz’s account to the realm of popular history illus- trated by Brohier.
The VOC’s outposts at the Cape of Good Hope and in Mauritius are known to have been chiefly supplied with Asian slaves dispatched from Bat- avia or Colombo on the annual return fleets. From the fragmentary evi- dence available, the origins of enslaved people in Colombo were initially thought to be mainly from the Indian subcontinent—Coromandel, Tan- jur, and Canara in South India—but there is evidence to suggest that from the 1660s, and especially after the fall of Makassar in 1667, slaves were also sourced from the Southeast Asian circuit encompassing Malaysia, Indone- sia, New Guinea, and Southern Philippines.17 Among the 1,570 company- enslaved people in 1685 and 1,741 in 1697, as cited by Remco Raben, or the 5,500 slaves in 1688 estimated by Matthias van Rossum, one can pon- der on how many were from Southeast Asia.18 Kate Ekama’s evidence for the late eighteenth century disturbs Gerrit Knaap’s view that most slaves in Colombo were purchased in South India in the late seventeenth century, although she warns that data on slave origins is very unreliable. Naming patterns and birthplace records suggest that many private and company slaves originated from Southeast Asia. This is most apparent in court cases and in records of the materiaalhuis (storage house, the old church in the castle) in Colombo, where deceased slaves were listed as “Bataviase” from Makassar, Ternate, Timor, and Boetin. This fact tallies with the origin of slaves who were involved in the fiscal’s murder in 1723. In the Decem- ber 1775 materiaalhuis list of nineteen deceased slaves, for instance, ten originated from Southeast Asia, with reference made to Bugis, Makassar, Mangarij, Timor, and Sumbawa. All ten were transported through Batavia. Others were transported through Coromandel, Tuticorin, and Malabar.19
While the evidence is tentative and limited, it helps explain the pres-
ence of enslaved Malay-speaking people in the British archive of the early nineteenth century, as the case of Valentin in chapter 2 will show. The
narrative of the sentencing and punishment meted to the prisoners described in the criminal rolls has, interestingly, never entered the public realm. Yet such a story could have been appropriated by the popular domain where, more than in academic history, tales of extreme violence, domination, and subjugation are often sought out.
Punishment
Another metamorphosis happened in popular history: the violent punish- ment of prisoners by the colonial authorities became a story of a violent rebellion performed by an enraged crowd of Kaffir slaves. The prisoners, as reported in the criminal rolls (which unfortunately do not contain the court proceedings), pleaded guilty in different ways. Scipio, Wintura, Titus, and Rake prayed for forgiveness, Lotty asked to be hanged, and Tenna asked for pardon. The court declared that the main culprit was Kedoe. He and six of the accused identified as his accomplices would die for the crime they committed in the cruelest manner in order to deter others.20 Kedoe as the leader was dragged to the execution place on a plank and bound to a cross by the executioner, who then scorched his bound arms, breasts, and thighs. Then he was cut open, his ear pulled out and his head cut off. The parts of his body and head were dragged around the citadel again and then hung on display with his head on a stick. The others would suffer a similar fate.21
Brohier’s account of the suppression of the “Kaffir insurrection” does not include any public execution but a decision on the part of public author- ities that all slave labor must be regimented:
At the end of their days work in institution, or the households of the grandees in the Colombo of those days, they were massed on the “Kaffirs Veldt” and had to answer to a roll call. They were thereafter led along a narrow passage through the ramparts, called a “Sally- poort,” and ferried across the lake to what was a jagged peninsula which came to be miscalled on old maps Ijemenaing “Island.” They were concentrated here for the night in lines and shanties. Amid the changes of three centuries this name “Slave Island” has stood firm.22
As in most mythographies, cause and effect and temporal moorings are nebulous.23 Brohier’s narrative appears to merge a number of different
events to create an explanation for the naming of the area as “Slave Island.” Another borrowing of details is in the description of the gruesome murder by “dagger,” which seems to be loosely inspired by another murder of a Dutch official by his slave at the end of the eighteenth century. In 1799 the last Dutch disava of Matara, Pieter Willem Ferdinand Adriaan van Schuler of Utrecht, as well as his wife, Wilhelmine Catharina Leembruggen, were both assassinated in their bed by a domestic slave. Anthonisz describes the events:
The slave having secreted himself in the sleeping chamber for the pur- pose, and who used his master’s own sword, which was hanging on the wall by the bed, for the perpetration of the deed. This he plunged deep into his victim’s breast; and the lady, on being stabbed in the abdomen as she seized the assassin to prevent his making his escape. The husband expired immediately, but the wife lingered long enough to be able to identify the miscreant and to secure his conviction and execution.24
Thus popular memory seems to have fused the two stories of murder by a slave. The reasons behind the naming of the area as Slave Island—in par- ticular its connection with a slave rebellion that may not have actually happened—need further exploration.
Slave Island
That the area was called Slave Island in connection with a past of slavery is not in doubt, but the nature of this connection and the dating of Bro- hier and others in his wake need to be scrutinized. A link between the name Slave Island and a violent Kaffir slave insurrection and its suppres- sion in the early eighteenth century lingers on today in guidebooks and general works. A recent dictionary of historical places repeated the same formula:
South of the fort lies Slave Island, so called because of events that took place during the time of Dutch rule. The Portuguese had brought slaves from east Africa to Colombo in the early 17th century, and the Dutch retained them as servants. Near the beginning of the
eighteenth century, the Africans violently revolted, killing some of their Dutch caretakers. After the insurrection was suppressed, the Dutch removed the rebels to a peninsula accessible only via the fort, and it is that peninsula that ever since has been known as Slave Island.25
Earlier references to the “island of slaves” as the place where the Dutch company kept their slaves point, however, to an earlier date of naming in the eighteenth century. Catholic priests such as Father Manoel Miranda in his correspondence to the Superior of the Oratory at Goa in 1704 and 1707 already referred to “the island of slaves” where he began his mission and where there were two chapels.26 Hence the naming of the peninsula most probably came from the fact that slaves employed by the VOC lived there at least since the early 1700s and seems to be unrelated to the murder of the fiscal in 1723 or any putative insurrection.
The term slaveneiland recurs in Dutch official documents in the mid- to late eighteenth century, as in the edict (plakaat) 307 of September 4, 1742, entitled Advertentie verbiedende om tussen zonsondergan en opgang op het lak van het slaveneiland te varen (Prohibition to sail on the lake of Slave Island between sunset and sunrise).27 In the first British accounts there appears no reference to a Kaffir revolt in Colombo. In 1807 James Cordiner described Slave Island in a lucid and pragmatic fashion: “This peninsula divides the lake and receives the above appellation from having formerly been occupied by slaves, who were employed in the service of the Dutch government. The English on their arrival made it a station for the Malay regiment.”28
Each writer focused on what interested them most. James Selkirk, a man of the church, saw the area as a religious center in 1844. No reference to a revolt of slaves seeps through: “A lake almost insulates the fort. In the cen- tre of this lake is a tongue of land called Slave Island being the place where the Dutch used to keep their slaves. It now contains several good houses, one of which the most handsome and most pleasantly situated is the resi- dence of the present Archdeacon of Colombo, the Venerable JMS Glenie.”29
The events surrounding the murder of the fiscal point to the metamor- phosis of an event over time and the dubious grounding on which author- itative knowledge of the name Slave Island rests. The deaths of de Swaan and his wife were caused by their domestic slaves, all originally from the East Indies, probably men and women who were in their employ in Kupang
in West Timor, where de Swaan was the resident (opperhoofd) from 1717 to 1721. The slaves were brought to Colombo when their master was posted to Sri Lanka.30 In 1723 the name Slave Island was already used for the place where the Dutch kept their company slaves. The equivalence between slave and African, which became internalized in the next centuries, did not work in the case of the fiscal’s murderers.
This does not mean that there had been no slaves of African origin or free Africans in Sri Lanka. Even if his numbers cannot be trusted, Ibn Bat- tuta mentions the presence of five hundred Abyssinians in the service of the minister and admiral Jalasti in Colombo in the fourteenth century.31 Africans had fought in armies of the Portuguese and of the local kings of Sri Lanka, as testified in Sinhalese literary works such as the seventeenth- century war poems the Parangi Hatana (War of the Portuguese) and the Rajasiha Hatana (War of Rajasingha). The Dutch too used African slaves, acquired through privateers for hard labor in the port and fort as well as field labor in rice, cotton, and tobacco cultivation. There are, however, no records based on shipping lists or censuses of the number of African slaves during Dutch rule, apart from figures etched in reports of Dutch gover- nors to their successors. The visual and judicial archives are more trust- worthy. Africans together with slaves from India and the East Indies were employed as domestics in houses, as some Dutch paintings of Esaias Boursse testify.32 On a number of occasions African slaves appeared in court cases in the mid- and late eighteenth century, as prisoners such as Louison, an African slave from Mauritius, or as witnesses to crimes committed by other slaves.33 Ten years after the murder of Barent van der Swaan, the former governor Jacob Christiaan Pielat warned the fiscal about trusting Kaffirs:
We cannot agree to the permanent appointment of two Kaffirs as assistants to the jailor for the guarding of the criminal prisoners. We consider that such an appointment should be made only in case of urgent necessity and even then, only temporarily; while they must never be allowed admittance to the prisoners alone but always in pres- ence of the jailor, so as to prevent any conspiracies. The jailor alone must be held responsible, as the Kaffirs cannot be trusted.34
The term “Kaffir” has had different semantic trajectories in Dutch and British colonial settings. Kaffir was a census category in Sri Lanka’s
colonial censuses until 1911, but even as it disappeared from the bureau- cratic language it continued to describe in popular culture a separate ethnic group of people of African descent. Unlike in South Africa, where Kaffir is today used as an offensive term to denigrate black people, in Sri Lanka the Sinhalese and Tamil usage of the term has no negative connotation. In South Africa during the early nineteenth century, the term would be used restrictively to qualify Xhosa people, while Khoikhoi and San, two other African ethnic groups, were referred to contemptuously as Hotten- tot and Bushman. The term Kaffir traveled to the metropole. The Xhosa wars from 1779 to 1880, fought between the Xhosa people and settlers of Dutch and British origin on the Eastern Frontier of the Cape of Good Hope, were unproblematically referred to as “Kaffir wars” in British par- liamentary debates of the period.35 Interestingly the term Kaffir, which once denoted “non-Muslims” at the Cape, later moved away from its original Islamic meaning and referred to slaves who performed police duties during the Dutch period.36 Many Asians performed the function of “servants of justice” at the Cape, whereas in Batavia it was African slaves.37 In Governor Pielat’s text referring to a Sri Lanka case, we might be deal- ing with a more fluid, nonracial notion of Kaffir that describes the func- tion of executioner’s assistants or policeman and could also encompass convicts of many races, as in South Africa. Yet no other sources corrobo- rate a broad, nonracial understanding of the term in Sri Lanka, which suggests a difference from the usage in Batavian or South African cases.38
Notions of Difference: Slaves, Blacks, and Free Blacks
The presence of enslaved people in Sri Lanka is documented through dif- ferent types of taxonomical exercises that were practiced during European rule in the maritime provinces. The archive of numbers where slaves appear is composed of censuses of the population of the island, Blue Books, and slave registers, the last enumeration being the kernel of the British inter- vention to gradually abolish slavery. There are moments when slaves who moved from one place to another were counted, but Indian Ocean slavery never yielded the type of lists of passengers on ships that became the norm in the late nineteenth-century indentured labor migration. Little is known, therefore, about the origin and journey by sea of enslaved peoples. There are only a few instances of captain’s logs, such as that of the ship Delaware,
that refer to enslaved people in ships transiting in Sri Lanka. The voyage from Batavia to the Cape often with a transit in Galle or Colombo, is esti- mated to have taken seventy-eight days.39 Many ships transported unfor- tunate unfree human beings under very difficult conditions as part of their cargo. The logbook of the Delaware refers to slaves only in quantities and as bodies, living or dead. On September 14, 1752, the ship was moored at Madras, and the captain’s log mentions carpenters working in the “slave rooms” on the ship. On October 15, fifteen slaves “belonging to the Hon- ourable Company” were brought on board, and the ship was ready for sail- ing. En route another thirty women slaves and two children were col- lected. They had to face the brunt of a hurricane, after which one slave woman was found dead between decks on November 1. Later in Novem- ber, as they approached Galle, the log stated that one of the slaves “is deliv- ered of a girl.” On the morning of November 27 one of the enslaved women died.40 In contrast to the practice in Atlantic slavery, where a slave gained a name in death owing to the need for accountability, her name and origin is not known or even mentioned.
Slaves and Free Blacks in Early Censuses
The idea of inventorying populations was not a feature unique to the nine- teenth century or to British rule, but under successive European powers, taxonomies obeyed a different logic. The Portuguese and Dutch had each ruled over the rich and populous maritime provinces of Sri Lanka for nearly 150 years, with far-reaching social consequences.
Figures of enslaved people in the island dating from the Portuguese period and later accounts remained vague and anecdotal and mostly absent. A listing, for instance, referred to the Colombo population in terms of 900 families of “noble citizens” (moradores nobres) and some 1,500 other “Portu- guese” families of artisans and merchants around 1650.41 Slaves were not mentioned. Neither did they appear in the Portuguese land registers (tombos) of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, since such registers recorded only landowners and potential taxpayers.42 The Dutch left various numbered accounts of the population, but with such differences that there remains much room for interpretation. There is thus considerable variation in the estimates of scholars and contemporary witnesses as to the number of slaves in the maritime provinces in the employ of the Dutch VOC or
privateers. Remco Raben suggests that by April 1661 approximately ten thousand company and private slaves were working as cultivators on the land in southwestern Sri Lanka that Governor van Goens wanted to develop.43 Other sources suggest lower figures for enslaved men, women, and children as company slaves in Colombo in the seventeenth century, but these figures, albeit tentative, give us an insight into the extent of slavery in the society of the day.44 The sketches of Jan Brandes show us enslaved peo- ple in Dutch homes working as domestics, artisans, or cooks. A household in Colombo could have up to ten slaves working in various capacities.45
During the Dutch administration, a first census of the population of Colombo was held in 1684 that counted only the free Christians that encompassed four population groups, categorized as Dutch, Castiz (born of European parents), Mestizo, and Toepass. The last two categories comprised people of mixed descent. Other lesser humans, considered hea- thens, which included Sinhalese, Muslims, Tamils, and slaves of various ori- gins, were left out. In 1694 a census of Colombo counted and divided the population into two categories: “Free” and “Slaves.” The census revealed that over 50 percent of the population was enslaved.46 Slaves played a cru- cial economic function in Colombo as in other VOC territories, and the census reflected the rulers’ concern for an appraisal of the availability of labor. VOC officials were heavily dependent on slave labor for all matters, from domestic work—in 1694, 74.8 percent of Dutch households had slaves—to construction and public works.47 Unsurprisingly, it was the governor of Ceylon, Thomas van Rhee, who was the largest slaveholder in the Colombo castle, with forty slaves, but in the town the widow of the commander of Malabar ( Jaffna), Isaak van Dielen, held sixty slaves.48 Ekama estimates the number of slaves laboring for the company in 1771 as amounting to 784, but in the absence of a census the figure is only tenta- tive.49 Numbers fell in the eighteenth century owing to the decline in a demand for labor, the return of Sinhalese people who worked the land as fulfillment of their caste obligations, and the company’s preference for hir- ing private slaves rather than owning them as an economizing measure.50 In 1789, by order of Governor Van de Graaf, the first census was made in Sri Lanka, covering all inhabitants in the Dutch East India Company, that is, the maritime provinces, and the population of free and enslaved enu- merated was estimated at 817,000.51 Before this census there had been other forms of counting people for specific purposes. Indigenous land records on
ola leaf (lekam miti) and later Portuguese tombos had surveyed lands and were directly tied to the issue of taxation or service rather than to an inter- est in counting and categorizing population groups. In contrast, Dutch tom- bos of the late eighteenth century, though designed to provide a detailed inventory of land ownership, yielded some information on the composition of the population in villages in Galle, Colombo, and Jaffna districts. How- ever, the temporal disparity in the registration of villages failed to provide “a credible census figure of individuals and holdings.”52 Moreover, the Dutch were only faintly interested in analyzing or classifying the island’s popula- tion, and one looks in vain for accounts of writers of the period that describe in detail the people of Sri Lanka, apart from Philippus Baldaeus’s early account and Francois Valentijn’s later one in 1726. Yet both drew extensively (if without attribution) on the work of others, so there might have been descriptions in reports or manuscripts.
Baldaeus gives a detailed description of the inhabitants of Jaffna, whom he observed in his capacity as a Dutch minister who had learned Tamil and spent a number of years in the area: “In Ceylon are divers clans, or Families as well as on the Coast of Coromandel. The Generation of the Bellales is the chiefest here since Christianity has been introduced, the Brahmans challenging the first rank among the Pagans.”53 Valentijn’s account that gives precedence to the Sinhalese in the Kandyan kingdom is not, however, based on a firsthand encounter with the peoples of the island: “The inhabitants,” wrote Valentijn, “are in part Cingalese, in part Bedas or Weddas, but besides these there are also Moors, Malabars (already referred to) and very many Portuguese, Dutch, some English and French who are prisoners of the Emperor (King of Kandy).”54 In both cases enslaved peoples were not referred to.
The division of the people into Sinhalese, Malabars (Tamils), and Moors was visible in the day-to-day bureaucratic accounts of the Dutch alongside the use of caste-like categories. Yet while these accounts did employ quan- tification, they differed from enumerations of the nineteenth century that followed a different rationale insofar as they led to a redirection of certain indigenous practices by affirming the value of particular forms of identity and consequent bodily distinctions. The colonial administrator E. B. Den- ham acknowledged this difference in 1911 when he wrote that “the Dutch were not ignorant of the value of censuses, but they regarded them as merely useful for taxation purpose.”55
A DUTCH TERM?
The term “black” was commonly found in accounts of Europeans from the seventeenth century to describe people whose complexion was con- sidered dark. Egidius Daalmans, a Belgian physician who wrote his impressions of Cape of Good Hope and Sri Lanka in 1687, uses the term to qualify “Cingalese” or “blacks of Ceylon.”56 There is also evidence that it was commonly used by the Dutch in Sri Lanka to qualify the sub- ject peoples. The Dutch used the epithet kakkerlak for Portuguese descendants in the maritime provinces whose appearance was closer to that of the natives.57 A graveyard in Galle divided into four parts points to the taxonomy based on color, religion, and freedom that prevailed: the inner churchyard was reserved for European Christians, and proba- bly also mestizos considered European enough, while the outer graveyard was subdivided into three sections: one for black (swarte) Christians both free and unfree, one for free non-Christians, and one for enslaved non-Christians.58
CO RYDON OF CEYLON, A FREE BLACK IN THE CAPE OF GOOD HOPE
The parallels between pre-British VOC taxonomies in colonies such as the Cape and Sri Lanka have seldom been foregrounded. The term “free black” is an obvious case in point. In Cape Town there is a curious and riveting story that goes back to the late eighteenth century about a “free black” called Coridon “of Ceylon” who was, it is believed, the first Muslim to own property in the Cape of Good Hope, then a Dutch colony. Intrigu- ingly, the term “free black,” used to describe Coridon, a man who was once enslaved and then freed in Cape Colony—just like the Dutch-inflected “Moor” and “Kaffir” as an occupation—finds its way across the Indian Ocean into censuses and enumerations of people in Sri Lanka until 1838. These terms hint at a more general mobility or resonance of words and their shifting meanings from one colonial territory to another, from metro- pole to colony, and reflect an empire-wide episteme of unstable racial taxonomies. “Free black” could thus be found as a descriptor not only in the Americas, the Caribbean, and Africa but also in Indian Ocean territo- ries and in Britain, but it carried different meanings in different locations. While in South Africa it qualified a person who had overcome his captive
self, the slave, and was free, in Sri Lanka free blacks were Sinhalese, Tam- ils, or Muslims who were neither slaves nor whites. Outside South Africa few people would know that in 1794 it was a manumitted slave of Salie van de Kaap, the free black called Coridon of Ceylon, who owned the property on Dorp Street in Cape on which the Auwal mosque still stands today. The mosque is recognized as the first one established in the coun- try. ‘Abdullah bin Qadi Abd al Salam, later known as Tuan Guru, born in 1712 and the son of a qadi, was a regal cleric from Tidore in the Ternate Islands of Indonesia and was appointed as its first imam. In 1793 Tuan Guru established a madrasa that operated from a warehouse attached to the home of Coridon in Dorp Street.59
While popular knowledge recognizes the geographical origins of Cori- don as an undeniable fact through his description as being “of Ceylon,” there is actually no evidence that he was born in Sri Lanka. It is far more likely that he, like many others, simply passed through a port of Sri Lanka before making the long voyage to the Cape of Good Hope. Yet many his- torians hold up written records of the colonial bureaucracy as testaments of a retrievable past made of the lives of men whose origins remain uncer- tain.60 If Coridon’s origins are opaque, they matter less than the story they symbolize. Coridon’s incomplete and uncertain journey from Sri Lanka to the Cape is not only exemplary of that of thousands of other lives, it also brings to light the connections that existed between places. In the Cape and Sri Lanka, two former VOC territories that became British crown col- onies in the early nineteenth century, there were resonances in the mode of ordering subjects using place and race as markers in the eighteenth cen- tury that continued in other forms during British rule. One can see at times an official focus on the individual as a colonial subject; at others or simultaneously, a desire for sharpening difference through the delimita- tion of broad collectives with ascribed common features such as color (whites and blacks) and people enjoying more or less liberty (free and enslaved).
During VOC rule, the term “black” (zwart) was equally used in Cape Colony for all manumitted slaves, exiles, and convicts who could be from Asian as well as African origin. 61 For this reason free blacks or manumit- ted slaves described as “of Ceylon” in Cape records are virtually impossi- ble to identify by ethnicity or birthplace because they generally have only one name, together with the “origin tag.” African, Malagasy, Indian, or Indonesian were all considered “Zwarten” at the Cape.62 The term “black”
was a former Dutch racial qualification for their entire empire in Asia and Africa. In nineteenth-century Sri Lanka the British understanding of the term was similarly inclusive of all nonwhite, nonenslaved colonized peo- ple, thus encompassing Sinhalese, Tamils, and Muslims alike. Yet it is dif- ficult to imagine how the VOC ideas of blackness that pervaded in Sri Lanka would have been transmitted to British colonial officials who took over governing the colony and influenced their perception of difference. It is more likely that ideas of skin color and blackness were already influen- tial in Britain from the late eighteenth century onward and traveled to the colonies from the metropole. Moreover, difference in color as a social category was a feature in the British Caribbean in the early nineteenth century, where no other colonial powers had preceded the British. As early as in 1799 the first governor of Ceylon, Frederick North, as he set foot in Sri Lanka, iden- tified “different orders of inhabitants,” and among the Burghers, a category of “Black Christians.”63
British Notions of Social Difference
The emergence and disappearance of the slave as a category of identity in Sri Lanka is an intriguing feature that has until now not been scrutinized.64 The slave as a category figures in the prehistory of the British census of Sri Lanka alongside many incongruous other categories that include large, all-encompassing terms. These terms contrasted with the flurry of social formations in the island that orientalist scholars and many colonial admin- istrators in the island had observed and recognized during the same period. From afar, race in the guise of euphemisms such as black and white was the prism through which the population was seen and regulated from the metropole, even if the colonial state was a racial formation that “marked differences by other names.”65 Even with the waning of slavery as an insti- tution, the absent figure of race structured the rule of colonial difference separating colonizer and colonized until the end of colonial rule. As slav- ery declined and more complex orientalist constructions of culture acquired prominence among rulers and elites, color-based racial categories “black” and “white” gave way to cultural-linguistic formations that first included Burghers, Sinhalese, Tamils, and Moors and later extended to other social groups.
ORIENTALIST READINGS
Radically different notions of the people of the island circulated among administrators and officials in London who were often responsible for designing the enumerations. They also shifted in time and varied according to the instrument of rule. Officials on the ground attempted to carefully produce gazetteers and administrative reports from firsthand observation. They were often overwhelmed by what they encountered—the different “castes,” “races,” “mixed races,” “half castes,” “religions,” “languages,” and “classes of people” that Robert Percival described in 1803 with their own “manners, customs and language.”66 This led to a tendency to flatten difference. The penchant for gaining knowledge of the non-European world by making the unfamiliar familiar by reading it through grids of intelligibility was a common feature of most colonial regimes. Some of the census categories emerged from this logic. The seemingly illogical and confused categories reflect the multiple understandings of social differ- ence that prevailed among officials in London as well as among adminis- trators of the British state who were sent to Sri Lanka to govern on its behalf.67 Alongside this tendency to simplify, there were other trends that led to a more localized reading of social difference.
The lives and work of men such as Frederick North, Eudelin de Jon- ville, Antonio Bertolacci, John D’Oyly, and Alexander Johnston suggest that many colonial administrators in Sri Lanka were aware that the people they ruled did not fall into the simple color-coded categories of the cen- suses. Efforts at understanding the culture and customs of the peoples were visible in important policies enacted in the first two decades of the nine- teenth century with regard, in particular, to the protection of Buddhism and to the extension of jury duty to local peoples in criminal cases where Europeans were not tried. These measures that recognized difference based on ethnicity, region, and religion were coeval with census operations.
When Frederick North, the first governor of Sri Lanka, embarked in London on the Brunswick in 1798 to sail to Bombay, he was accompanied by an exceptionally gifted group of men speaking a number of languages and bearing expertise in a variety of fields. Among them was Eudelin de Jonville, clerk for natural history and agriculture, who would write in French the first account on the island under the British, Some Notions About the Island of Ceylon. Jonville sent a rough draft of his manuscript to the board
of the East India Company as early as 1801 and never ceased to share his ideas with his paymasters, making many attempts at publishing his account but in vain. The account contains many glaring misconceptions, especially on the “religion of the Boudho,” but it also conveys the eagerness that pre- vailed during the early nineteenth century, when the spirit of the Enlight- enment easily merged with romantic notions, to understand the people of Sri Lanka, and the sense of curiosity that existed regarding the customs of the Sinhalese of the Low Country and Kandy.68 Bertolacci, who came on the same ship with him and became controller general of customs and later acting civil auditor, divides the inhabitants of the island into “four distinct nations”: “Ceylonese Proper,” “Malabars or Hindoos,” “Moors,” and “Vedas.”69
The two most prominent orientalists of the early nineteenth century were John D’Oyly, a key figure in the annexation of the kingdom of Kandy in 1815, and Alexander Johnston, who served as the island’s third chief jus- tice from 1811 to 1819. Both men and those who gravitated around them were intrigued by the cultures they encountered and made efforts to learn the vernacular languages. D’Oyly, who had been instructed by the high priest of Matara, Karatota Kirti Sri Dhammarama, excelled in Sinhala and became the chief translator to the government. He drafted the Act of Set- tlement after the fall of the kingdom of Kandy to the British in 1815, in which occurs the phrase “The religion of Boodhoo . . . is declared invio- lable.” William Tolfrey, who worked under D’Oyly in Kandy, translated the Bible into Sinhala and was the first Briton to master Pali.70 Johnston’s lineage prepared him for an exceptional career as a colonial official. He had encountered the most renowned orientalists of India while growing up in Madura, where his father was paymaster, and during his time in Sri Lanka studied with great care the customs and laws of the indigenous peo- ple. He believed in the capacity of the natives to dispense judgment and reason. Thus he was instrumental in introducing a Charter of Justice, which among other things introduced the jury system to the “natives of Ceylon.” According to article 11 of the charter, the collectors were directed to pre- pare “lists of all persons resident in their Districts who by their Character and condition may be deemed qualified to sit upon juries distinguishing them into their respective Classes and casts.”71 Writing about this measure later on, Johnston referred to the grantee of this new right as “half caste Native” and “every other native of the country to whatever caste or reli- gious persuasion he might belong.”72 The exoticizing gaze of the early
orientalists on what they perceived as the different communities and castes of the island had little bearing on the making of categories of classification in the early censuses, where the rule of “colonial difference” founded on race and color still prevailed. Yet the recognition of groups based on lan- guage, caste, ethnicity, and religion in other affairs of the state, such as at the judiciary, lends credence to studies that adhere to a more multidimen- sional notion of difference in the colonial sphere.73 Clearly, as far as gov- ernance was concerned, the grid of colonial power traversed the social order in its entirety rather than in binary terms.74 The notion of blackness and the more complex reading of difference by orientalist scholar- administrators permeated in an uneven manner societies and bureaucra- cies in the metropole and the colonies.
The Idea of Blackness in Britain
Indian servants and Ayahs who lived in Britain in the eighteenth century were commonly referred to as “negro” or as “black.” It was not uncom- mon to hear about “a black man from Bengal,” “a black Indian boy,” or an “East Indian Black from Bombay” who had been brought over from India to work in the households of former East India Company officials.75 To what extent these words indexed an inarticulate color prejudice rather than a developed racial ideology is difficult to ascertain. Roxann Wheeler speaks of the “fluid articulation of human variety” and the “elasticity of race” in the eighteenth century. In particular, she warns against anachronistic and essentialist understandings of “race” as a set of fixed physical characteris- tics and suggests that diversity of human behavior and religious and cul- tural traits were more important as markers of difference than differences in color.76 The presence of Africans in Britain was visible after the con- quest of the New World, and they were seen serving in the court as trum- peters, or in the mansions of the gentry as pages or laundry maids. Rich planters, officers on slave ships, and seamen returned to Britain with Afri- can slaves.77 When one looks beyond the statements of theorists of race and turns to the way race was practiced in late eighteenth-century Britain, the picture that emerges is somewhat different. The contrast between the eigh- teenth century and nineteenth century appears to be overstated. Later bigots could build on exclusionist and color-inflected policies of the ear- lier century. This is not to deny the break that occurred in the nineteenth
century, when social status and religion ceased to be so explicitly impor- tant to Britons as the English increasingly constructed an imperial cosmol- ogy whereby skin color came to distinguish ruler from ruled.78 In the first half of the nineteenth century, blacks were as ill-defined as a few decades before, when the plight of seamen originating in the American or Asian territories who had served on merchant ships or in the Royal Navy and were roaming without means in London led to the creation in 1786 of a Committee for the Relief of Black Poor by Jonas Hanway. This included all dark-skinned indigents, lascars from Mozambique to Malaya and Indian servants who totaled about ten thousand persons in London and other port cities.79 This number increased with the arrival of free Americans after the American Revolution. Thus when the censuses for the colonies were being created at the very moment Britain was living its troubled transition to a society without slaves, blacks defined as nonwhites were already a familiar and inferior social group in the metropole. It is therefore not surprising that in British India and Sri Lanka the term “black” was used to describe Indians or Sinhalese and to label spatially segregated areas, as in the white town and black town of Madras and Colombo, where the British called the Pettah, the native area at the outer fringe, the black town.80 Robert Percival explained in 1805 that the term “black town” came “from its being chiefly inhabited by black merchants and tradespeople.”81 Thus by the early nineteenth century the terms white and black seemed naturalized by Brit- ish colonial officials on the ground.
It is in the late nineteenth-century imperial world that the term “blacks”
ceased to loosely encompass all nonwhites and become reserved for Afri- cans, and Africa was constructed as the other that needed to be civilized and uplifted. The belief in British superiority became the norm, as well as the acceptance of the cultural inferiority of all those with black skins.82 A recent work on the census has argued that racial classification played a sig- nificant part in the way British people understood their empire, in con- trast with German and Austrian predominant concerns with linguistic and cultural differences. For the British, the world was seen as one where dif- ferent races competed, and in England this included a fear of Irish and Scot- tish immigration.83 These ideas were then applied to the colonies. Accord- ing to Christopher Anthony, throughout the British colonies the decennial metropolitan census initiated in 1801 and the U.S. enumeration conducted since 1790 served as models.84 The first U.S. enumeration, for instance, made a distinction between whites, “all other free persons,” and slaves, thus
building a racial classification into a scheme that was initiated to determine who was free and hence taxable.85 The framing of difference along the lines of whites, others, and slaves obeyed a logic unique to the United States. Yet it showed family resemblances with the language in use in Britain and its colonies.
Slaves and Blacks in Taxonomies of the Early Nineteenth Century
The census in colonized territories has generally been described as an instrument of rule in authoritative works dealing with colonialism and empire. What made it unique among other forms of statistical inquiry was its prerogative to gather information about a single territory. This could be a nation, as in Britain with the census of 1801, or a colony, such as Sri Lanka in the Census of 1824, which covered for the first time all the prov- inces under British rule, including the Kandyan provinces.
The enmeshing of knowledge and control has been the subject of a vast, multilayered, and vigorously debated scholarship on colonial knowledge, power, technologies of rule, and governmentality that I will only briefly deal with here. The argument that the census stood as a document whose manifest rhetoric was technical but whose subtext was disciplinary is indeed a well-established one.86 The gist of it is that the act of enumerating sub- jects living in newly conquered territories was conceived as a guide for rul- ers to deal with their subjects by acquiring knowledge of the number of potential bodies that could be taxed or used for war and labor. The disci- plinary argument, however, is less convincing in the early nineteenth cen- tury when methods of collecting data in Sri Lanka were amateurish and categories used in censuses to divide the “natives” were of a transient nature. In Sri Lanka the first British endeavors to count the governed were only a little more systematic than those of their premodern predecessors, the Portuguese and Dutch, and remained characterized by an appearance of factuality that hid the fiction of categories. As in other colonial territories, the process of gathering statistical information was often fudged by infor- mants, enumerators, and commissioners.87 Although the census was a policy requirement made in the metropolis, it depended on numerous intermediaries for its implementation. Pragmatic reasons guided the pro- cess of enumerating peoples in Sri Lanka as in other colonies. Early
race-based enumerations contrasted with the later ones insofar as the clear-cut categories based on color and level of freedom were less protean in nature and conveyed less of an impression of confusion and ambiguity. There was some uncanny logic and order to the racialized view of society of the early nineteenth century. These early classifications were partly devised in London by ill-informed officials sitting in the Colonial Office who applied a single template to all crown colonies. They were not mir- rors of society but rather revealed much about the interests and power relations of the counter and counted.88 In this instance the census was partly answering a need that came from outside the colony: that of British parliamentarians eager to assess the success of amelioration policies with regard to the abolition of slavery in Sri Lanka, in contrast to the relative failure to end slavery in India. The presence of the slave as a category of census from 1814 to 1838 could be explained by an interest in numbers as evidence.
When a census was taken in 1814, there was still one independent Sin- halese kingdom in the hills of Kandy that remained, ruled by a dynasty that descended from South Indian Nayakkars. Antonio Bertolacci, a civil servant under Governor North, had undertaken a survey of the popula- tion of the maritime provinces between 1808 and 1810 based on food con- sumption and estimated the population at 700,000.89 These were, however, uncertain times for the British, who were still not in full control of the island. In the census taken a few years later, in 1814, the population enu- merated did not exceed 492,000, a much lower figure that has been explained by the incidence of a serious famine in the years 1811–1813.90 Bertolacci himself mentions repeated droughts in those years that were detrimental to the cultivation of rice and led to famine and distemper, especially in the district of Matara.91
The General Abstract of the Population of the Maritime Districts of the Island of Ceylon in 1814 divided districts into ethnolinguistic regions, namely, Singalese districts that included Colombo, Caltura, Galle, Ham- bantotte, Chilaw, and Malabar, and Tamil districts including Batticaloam, Trincomalee, Jaffnapatam, Delft, Vanni, and Mannar. The categories used to classify the population of the Colombo district into collectivities are reli- gions and “casts.” Under the latter, however, one finds a variety of groups, ranging from ethnic groups such as Cingalese, Malabars, and Europeans to occupational groups including blacksmiths, wood-cutters, and barbers. In this long list of casts appear the two distinct categories of “free slaves”
(numbering 209), and “slaves” (857). The enumeration in the Galle district only includes “free slaves,” while in the Batticaloa district there were two different categories, “slaves” (92), and “Kovilan Slaves of the Pagoda” (477). This group probably accounted for slaves of Vellalas (the highest caste among the Tamils) working in the temples. In the Trincomalee district yet another variation could be found, with two categories, “slaves” (70) and “Dutch Company Slaves” (30).92 The slave was thus omnipresent in this early census.
After the 1818 and 1821 acts of gradual emancipation of children of slaves (dealt with in chapter 3), counting slaves and their opposite, free people or “free blacks,” acquired an additional function apart from that of offering the colonial government a picture of the peoples it was ruling, according to their occupation and their ability to be deployed for labor. Figures were indeed of crucial importance for the gradual abolition of slavery to be charted and proven by abolitionists before their many opponents in the British Parliament. Lt. Col. Colebrooke’s report of 1831 upon the administration of the government of Ceylon, which was invoked in a parliamentary paper of 1838, testifies to the importance of census num- bers as verifiable evidence: “Personal slavery, however is nearly extinct in the Cingalese provinces, but it still exists among the Malabars in the northern districts of Ceylon. The number of slaves in the district of Jaffna, according to the returns of 1824, was 15,350. The number of domestic slaves throughout the maritime provinces does not exceed 1,000.”93
In the 1824 census mentioned in the parliamentary paper, slave catego- ries are included in even more detail than in 1814. Descendants of slaves number 221; free slaves, 1,115; and slaves, 17,538, including 15,341 entered as slaves among the “Covias, Nalluas, and Pallas of Jaffna,” 18 as “slaves of the Burghers,” and 78 as “formerly slaves of the late Dutch government.”94 In the Colombo district, 610 slaves were listed separately according to gen- der and age (above or below puberty). The census also provides intriguing variations on the slave status of people: “descendants of slaves” are listed as numbering 221; “free slaves,” 577; and “slaves,” 610. The Galle district con- tains the same categories and includes a “Memorandum of the Slaves and Free Slaves,” clearly emphasizing the importance of this classification.95
The reforms spawned by the Colebrooke-Cameron Commission (1829– 1830) endorsed free labor and conceded a form of representation through the nomination of unofficial members in a newly formed Legislative Coun- cil, a forum for discussion of legislative matters, to local elites of different
communities—Low Country Sinhalese, Tamil, and Burgher. Thus, from then on, communities began to be identified racially in the “enumerable sense,” in contrast to the previous decades where there was a flurry of cat- egories. The Ceylon Almanac of 1838 indicates that in a census of the pop- ulation taken that year that did not cover the entire island, leaving out regions such as the Seven Korales, Nuwarakalawiya, and Bintenna, the population, counted and categorized, was estimated at 1,241,825 persons. These types of figures that were regularly published in almanacs and Blue Books were based on headmen’s returns and birth and death registers.96 Their doubtful accuracy was compounded by the fact that many people fled instead of submitting themselves to counts as they feared taxation as a consequence. The final appearance of the slave as a category of census and official classification was in 1838. By that time slavery had been abolished in the rest of the empire except in India, Sri Lanka, and St. Helena, and the commissioners of Eastern Inquiry had published the Colebrooke- Cameron Report, generally read as a key moment in the country’s encounter with modernity.97
For historians of colonialism, the truth of numbers is less important than the mirror, even partial and warped, that the census holds on a colonial understanding of indigenous society. The difference from India is strik- ing. Intriguingly, in sharp contrast to similar enumerations in gazetteers and early censuses held in India during the nineteenth century where caste and occupation were the markers, in Sri Lanka the census categories until 1838 were not only based on skin color (whites and blacks) but also indexed freedom or lack of freedom.98
In a practical sense, the arrival of notions of white and black conjoined with slaves and free blacks in the bureaucratic language of Sri Lanka dur- ing British rule could be linked to a template that was being applied to the empire at large and began with the Blue Books in 1822. The colonial Blue Books appear to have originated in a request from the Commons Select Committee of Finance in 1817 for returns of offices in the colonies. A book asking for the return of statistical information was first sent to each gover- nor in 1822; this seems to have increased to three blank books by 1828. Lord Bathurst was the colonial secretary who inaugurated the issue of Blue Books on colonial affairs for all the colonies from 1822 onward that pur- ported to give for each colony “a species of comprehensive budget.”99 A colonial publication succinctly summed up the history of Blue Books:
The Colonial Office, in Downing Street, has received annually for a series of years a “Blue Book” in manuscript from each Colony, con- taining a variety of commercial, financial, ecclesiastical, and general information for the use of Government. The “Blue Books” were commenced about the year 1828. Three blank books, with ruled col- umns and printed headings, are sent to each Colony every year; the blank columns are filled in by returns from the different departments, under the authority of the Colonial Secretary in each settlement; these returns are then sent in duplicate to Downing Street, and one of the three copies is retained in the Colony for the use of the Governor.100
In Sri Lanka, as in other British colonies such as Grenada or British Gui- ana, the population section of these annually produced colonial Blue Books of the early nineteenth century referred to “White,” “Free Black” or “Free Coloured,” and “Slave.”101 These were the printed headings that formed a common grid of legibility to deal with the diverse peoples under British rule. This empire-wide system constituted a forerunner of the modern, sci- entifically conducted censuses, but this uniformity was lost after the 1840s when each colony sought an individual form of categorization.102
On page 127 of the Blue Book of 1825, the governor would read this directive sent to him from London: “Insert population according to last census, and if none has ever been taken according to the last means of infor- mation that may be accessible.”103 These orders were diligently followed. The figures in the Blue Book of 1827 were based on the first official census that was made in 1824 under Governor Edward Barnes. They set the stage for a division of the people into imperial categories based on skin color and freedom.
In the enumeration of 1838, the final one where slaves were counted, blacks could be either “free” or slaves, unlike whites, who by definition enjoyed freedom.104 As the nineteenth century proceeded, the grid of the table began to form the core of census reports and supported all official missives from Colombo to London discussing the matter of slavery.105 With the table, a taxonomy was produced together with a hierarchy and posi- tions of things or people in relation to each other. The idea of certain groups being the numerical proportion of a whole (the total) was a new and revo- lutionary concept. The table brought legitimacy to figures that were far from reliable.
TA BLE 1.1
Population of Sri Lanka Based on Ceylon Almanac of 1838
Males Females
Whites 2,912 2,929
Free blacks 622,842 565,246
Slaves 14,108 13,289
Total 639,862 581,464
Source: H. N. S. Karunatilake, “Social and Economic Statistics of Sri Lanka in the Nineteenth Century,” Royal Asiatic Society of Sri Lanka Branch, New Series 31 (1986/87): 45.
For censuses carried out in the 1820s and 1830s, the count of slaves in households was based on headmen’s returns. How was information col- lected? Were enslaved people spoken to? If the head of household was indigenous to the island, as the main informant, did his answers reflect the variety of words and meanings that existed in the vernacular languages for “slave”? The Sinhalese-English Dictionary of 1830, compiled under gov- ernment patronage by William Tolfrey with the help of two local infor- mants, Cornelis de Saram and Don Jacobus Dias Bandaranaike, and taken on by Rev. Benjamin Clough upon the death of Tolfrey, lists a variety of words that are translated as slave, which brings into light the vagueness and pliable nature of the category:106
Bhritiya: servant, slave
Cheti: female servant or slave
Das: slave, skill, ability, sight, seeing
Dasaya: slave, bond servant
Desi: female slave
Goyu: freckle, slave
Karmakara: hired labor, servant, name of Yama, regent of the dead, slave
Kella: female slave, little girl, lass
Midya: female slave
Parichara: guard, attendant, companion, slave, servant Pataraturu: slave, bond servant, menial, dependent Pessa: servant, slave
Piliyana: slave, dependent, servant, menial
Sevakaya: slave, servant, menial Vidupa: slave, servant, menial Wala: a slave, dependent107
The words dasaya and pataraturu convey most sharply the idea of being bonded rather than working as a free (nidahas) servant in a household. Yet other words, such as pessa or vidupa, suggest an overlap between the status of slave and servant, which might have had some bearing on census fig- ures. These words reflect, as in the Indian case, “the range of labour arrange- ments that could be termed slavery, each involving slightly different pat- terns of servitude and ownership.”108 Trust in numbers and figures among British officials was not a constant, and the imperfection of the data was clearly acknowledged. In 1838 the extraordinary variations of the number of slaves in the statements of the population caused some anxiety in Justice Jeremie, who read them as a sign that slaves had been imported to the island. But this interpretation was quickly dismissed by Governor R. W. Horton, who claimed that “such statements are of no authority and are compiled from very imperfect data.”109
The flourishing of census making and enumeration in Europe arose amid the context of the rise of statistics and new tools of analysis. Interest- ingly, it was at Haileybury, home to the East India College, that census- making officials and enumerators for the British Empire were trained in statistics.110 The census had many genealogies. In Norbert Peabody’s argu- ment, the genesis of Indian census categories and modes of knowing based on caste can be traced to enumerations of households taken in the king- dom of Marwar between 1658 and 1664 under the direction of the king- dom’s home minister. It was, he suggests, not a purely European episteme since colonial discourses often built on indigenous ones.111 His argument challenges a long tradition of scholarly production on the census in India and Sri Lanka that foregrounds its unique generative feature. The census of India, in B. S. Cohn’s seminal work, in particular, is shown not only casting an external gaze but also creating many of the social forms, as cat- egories of practice through a process of classifying and objectifying.112 Arjun Appadurai has referred to the “colonial imaginaire” produced by these inaccurate and unscientific “colonial body counts.” “Numbers,” he con- tends, “gradually became . . . part of the illusion of bureaucratic control and a key to a colonial imaginaire in which countable abstractions, both of
people and of resources created the sense of a controllable indigenous reality.”113
In retrospect, and in contradistinction to the view on the modern cen- sus (1871), a very different argument could be made with relation to the early British modes of enumeration in Sri Lanka. In India, caste, in spite of the absence of any form of consensus on caste or caste hierarchies, became entrenched and the norm. In Sri Lanka, however, there was a much longer phase of experimentation, contest, and flurry of categories. In fact, the cen- sus categories that were in use in the early decades of the nineteenth cen- tury completely disappeared, to be replaced by others that remained, none- theless, equivocal.
The reality of colonial rule was, however, an uncontested relation of power where the rulers exerted coercion over the indigenous peoples of the land, encompassed in the racial term “free blacks” to distinguish them from the category of slaves. In the Sri Lankan case, the necessity of count- ing the enslaved population kept alive the category of free blacks until the late 1830s.
On August 13, 1838, Governor J. A. Stewart Mackenzie sent the secre- tary to the colonies, Lord Glenelg, a missive with numbers of slaves formally manumitted since the meeting of the Legislative Council on June 28, 1838, the number of slaves registered under Ordinance No. 3 1837, and a return of the number of slaves according to the latest census. The census of 1838 and its categories of classification clearly served a distinct function: that of charting, in the words of the governor himself, the “happy advance to abolition of slavery in the island.”114
After the slave disappeared as an identifiable social entity, the orien- talist idea that the social body was an aggregation of collective and communal bodies would gradually gain ground, as it already informed the first forms of political representation based on group difference granted to the islanders in the 1830s following the Colebrooke-Cameron reforms.
Slave Names in Nineteenth-Century Slave Registers
The slave register, unlike the census and Blue Book, offers data about named individuals rather than groups. The most comprehensive registers are those of 1818–1832, but there are earlier slave registers in the British period that
have been either destroyed or lost in the process of creating an archive. In 1798 Brigadier General de Meuron, who exerted military power over Sri Lanka after the Dutch capitulation, recommended the gradual abolition of slavery and the establishment of a register to secure to proprietors of slaves their property subject to a certain tax. Private property—which included slaves—had been guaranteed in all the capitulations. Governor North issued a proclamation in 1801 according to which all slaves were to be produced with their bonds and registered by May 1, 1802, or else they would be con- sidered free. Governor Maitland, his successor, ordered the registration of slaves within four months of his regulation of August 14, 1806. There were delays, however, and the registration was never completed. The Maitland registers have never been read or cited in the historiography of the island. In 1818 two new regulations (nos. 9 and 10) were passed in Sri Lanka, which led, inter alia, to the creation of a registry of slaves in all areas of the mari- time provinces. The registers for the northern districts of the island, where the majority of slaves lived, were divided into two kinds: those for domes- tic slaves and those for Nalavar, Pallar, and Coviyar slaves, who were indig- enous to the island. The slaves listed in the registers of the southern dis- tricts were city dwellers who worked in homes as domestics or artisans and whose ancestors generally came from other VOC territories. Their names offer some insight, although very tentative, into the possible origin of the slaves.
In the slave registers for the Colombo district, for instance, different clus- ters of names appear: slaves who were given names from classical mythol- ogy, others who were given biblical names, names from the months of the year or days of the week, and Dutch- or European-sounding names. A fair number of slaves had names that were clearly Asian in origin, even when written down phonetically by the hesitant hand of a British official. These names, which take us back to those slaves who died in the pillory in 1723, merit some mention.115
sri lanka names
Caronchy, Rascowella, Pooncha (3), Apu, Araliya, Kediramere, Champokke (2) (Champika ?), Mootowa, Caloewa (kalu), Pantchi, Suman (Saman)
india
Apu, Sarvel (Sharvil), Mallati (Malathi) (2)
malay
Lucho (Lucu), Achamatus (2), (Ahmatus), Bentan (Bintan), Zamida, Ontong (Untung), Teija (Teja), Pooncha (3), (Puncak), Norifah (2), Zuraidah (2), Sele (Sallay/Salih), Champokke (3), (Cempaka), Seewa (2), (Sewa), Muskin (Miskin), Andika, Mawar, Jelek, Melati (2), Nuu- fiah/Nofiah, Norifsa (Norfizah), Seya (Zaidah), Suman (Saman), Satu
Sewo
Javanese
balinese
Puto (Putu), Bugu, Lakaay (Lakaag), Lafoor
north india
Zulfia, Seema, Zamida, Assani (Asani), Packreen (Pakhreen), Kuthe- ria, Afsana, Afsen (Afshin), Jafar
tamil
Kethan, Ayyapan, Jehel Covia, Sinne Pulle, Letchemi (2), (Latcumi), Moettoe (2), (Muthu), Namasivagam, Savery Mooto, Sinnacathy (Sinnakutty)
muslim tamil
Mootoosamat (Muthu Samath)
malayali
Karuppa (2), Calle Cottal, Arathi, Cutthoor Kitto, Palliadal (Palli- yadiyil), Narapore Patcha, Markan (Marakkan)
The limited data from slave registers suggests a predominantly South and Southeast Asian origin of around 10 percent of the names. Allowing slaves to keep their birth names is a unique phenomenon that is not found in slave registers of other Indian Ocean colonies. The vast majority of slave names in the registers, however, are unidentifiable in terms of ori- gin. In the majority of cases, slaves were renamed in a dehumanizing act of erasure. James Scott has famously argued that a significant aspect of
maintaining relations of domination consists of the symbolization of domination by demonstrations and enactments of power, such as erasing the past of a person through renaming and cutting family ties.116 Renam- ing was essential to enforcing domination and creating powerlessness. “Slaves differed from other human beings,” writes Orlando Patterson, “in that they were not allowed freely to integrate the experience of their ancestors into their lives, to inform their understanding of social reality with the inherited meanings of the natural forebears, or to anchor the living in any conscious community of memory.”117 The trajectory of the notion of blackness, the metamorphosis of the Indonesians accused of kill- ing a Dutch fiscal into African Kaffir rebels, is understandable only in relation to the shifting official and popular perceptions of slavery in the long nineteenth century.
Over the first half of the nineteenth century, the census was a bureaucratic instrument that charted the collective through the delimitation of people along color lines and a simple grid that separated free and unfree peoples. Its purpose was both disciplinary, insofar as it was used by colonial func- tionaries on the ground to rule their subjects by extracting taxes from them, and justificatory, as it provided numerical data crucial to negotia- tions with their interlocutors in the metropole.118 It was, for instance, possible to use numbers to suggest initiating reforms in the labor regime or for parliamentarians in London to add fuel to their campaign for the abolition of slavery in the empire by arguing that slave labor was still a significant feature in the island. Numbers provided evidence in spite of their often dubious accuracy. The disappearance of the slave, black, white, and free black as categories of enumeration firmly entrenched the trans- formation “of the census as an instrument of taxes to an instrument of knowledge.”119
Reading the enumerations of the early nineteenth century along the grain allows a reflection on the xenologies of the day and on what deter- mined the choice of unstable taxonomies based on color and freedom and what led to their end. The presence of the categories of blacks and slaves stems from different and connected anxieties of a new colonial power in the island: the establishment of firm and uncrossable boundaries between colonizer (white) and colonized (free blacks), defined in a binary, must be conceived as deeply connected to the imperial demand for charting the suc- cessful decline of slavery.
The life and death of categories reflect, as this chapter has shown, what is at stake at a particular moment in time: in this case, the necessity for colonial officials to manage the transition from slavery to its abolition. The disappearance of the categories of slave and free blacks saw the appearance of racialized categories to describe the various collectivities that formed the subject population of the crown colony. With the formal and defini- tive Ordinance of Abolition of 1844, the category of slave began to fade from the memory of people in the island and undergo the metamorphosis or blackening described in the first part of this chapter.
In the popular realm, however, notions of slave and black traveled in time, acquiring their own garbs of meaning. Slaves were increasingly asso- ciated with Africans, as memories and records of slaves hailing from other parts of the colonial world faded away. The term “black” has a similar his- tory as “slave,” disappearing from public documents in the 1830s but remaining as an invisible signifier until the departure of the British from the island. As late as 1942 a Sri Lankan mutineer against British rule in the military settlement of the Cocos Islands explained his motive for mutineer- ing in terms of a war between blacks and whites.120
The next chapters will explore the lives of individual slaves in Sri Lanka through a range of documents where the enslaved is a name or belongs to a collective, where she sometimes has a monetary value attached to her, and where, on occasion, she appears alongside a master whose life is given some prominence. These stories will bring to light the partial nature of our knowledge of events and people of the past and the logic of the proce- dures through which information is collected, stored, conserved, and uti- lized as well as memorialized or forgotten.
CHAPTER II
From Colombo to Galle
Enslaved Bodies in an Archive of Violence
Your craft is to conjure a social system from a nutmeg grater.
— CAROLYN STEEDMAN 1
The archive is, in this case, a death sentence, a tomb, a display of the vio- lated body, an inventory of property, a medical treatise on gonorrhoea, a few lines about a whore’s life, an asterisk in the grand narrative of history.
I
— SAIDIYA HARTMAN 2
n 1703 a vessel named Ter Eem left the port of Colombo to Batavia carrying as cargo 38,000 pounds of cinnamon valued at 11,814.12 Indian guilders and twenty-six humans described as “slaves” and “Malabars” valued at 1,041.88 Indian guilders.3 Many other ships transported a similar mixed cargo, a clear demonstration that enslaved people in the Indian Ocean basin were considered incidental goods, quite unlike the Middle Passage, where ships built or refashioned exclusively for the purpose of slave cargo transported enslaved Africans across the Atlantic to a life of forced labor on plantations.4 Yet throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth cen- turies thousands of enslaved people in the Indian Ocean world, including Sri Lanka, made the journey out as cargo on ships, traveling with large quantities of pepper, cinnamon, myrrh, coffee, olibanum, salt, and silver- plated horse-riding gear to faraway destinations such as Batavia or the Cape of Good Hope.5 Others from India, the East Indies, and Africa made the journey to Sri Lanka, where their lives left few traces in the colonial archive. In 1796, when the British took over the maritime provinces of the island, which had once been under the control of the VOC, they introduced new laws that led to an irreversible movement toward the abolition of slavery
in a legal sense.
This chapter follows four enslaved people in the southern part of the island in the first decades of British rule, from Colombo to Galle, at
[ 51 ]
moments of acceleration when their lives suddenly become less “insig- nificant” and draw a faint sign on the wall of recorded history. It listens to the murmurs of these enslaved people hidden in the legal archive and to “the object we have come to call violence.”6 It is an “archive of trans- lations” in need of forcing and prying, an archive of fragments that opens a hesitant story that often has no closure.7 It is indeed because violence was both committed and experienced that the lives of the four enslaved people were even reported. Violence is present in multiple and cruel forms in a life so unbearable that an enslaved woman, Selestina, killed her newborn child in 1820; an enslaved man, Valentine, running away from servitude, died murdered on a Maradana road; a woman from Cochin sold in Galle made a strong claim for freedom; and a child kid- napped for the Arabian slave market was saved by diligent neighbors and the British collector of Galle.
These stories come to us only in the fragments that the official records yield. What the historian has to work with are not verifiable facts but incomplete narratives and nonconforming structures that call for a differ- ent mode of history writing. We need to tell the story of the lives of the enslaved from their own perspective, follow them as they navigate the ter- rain of early nineteenth-century Sri Lanka, and remain attentive to the limits of historical representation. These shreds of stories give us a sense that slavery was characterized by both direct forms of domination, where the brutal asymmetry of power comes to light in regular and quotidian exercises of violence, and indirect forms of violence, more difficult to cap- ture, that fall under the rubric of paternalism. In all four cases one gets a fleeting glimpse of the refusal to accept the terms set: infanticide could be read as protest, a refusal of sexual violence and being objectified; flight was a way of resisting, though in this case it was interrupted by murder; and the appeals to colonial justice in the final two cases signal a desire for mov- ing out of enslavement or the conditions that come with it. A decolonial reading of archival traces allows us to challenge the authority of records produced under conditions of domination. Before I relate the stories of these four individuals who represent the condition of enslavement and reflect on the way they acted in their own particular circumstances and within the restraints of the time, it is necessary to set the stage, for the con- dition of enslavement could exist only if proprietors practiced and con- doned it.
Slaveholders in the Southern Maritime Provinces
When the British took control of the southern maritime provinces (fig. 2.1), they inherited a society of subjects bestowed with different degrees of freedom and autonomy from their predecessors, the Portuguese and Dutch, who traded in humans across the Indian Ocean. As the tentative understanding of the origins of slaves discussed in the previous chapter indicates, in VOC-held territories it was customary not to enslave the indigenous populations but rather to bring slaves from elsewhere. The north- ern province in Sri Lanka was an exception to this rule, as chapter 3 will demonstrate.
The fact that Sri Lanka became a crown colony rather than an office of the British East India Company (EIC) in 1802 resulted in abolition proce- dures for slavery that were quite different from those in India. Uniquely for South Asia, forms of slavery across the island were included in empire- wide gradual abolition and emancipation procedures mentioned in chap- ter 1.8 While the British abolished the slave trade in 1807, slavery contin- ued to be practiced in Sri Lanka until its formal abolition in 1844. The majority of slaveholders in Colombo in the first decades of the nineteenth century were of Dutch descent or Burghers, as shown in the data from slave registers (fig. 2.2). C. C. Uhlenbeck’s life and afterlife provide us with some insight beyond numbers.
C. C. Uhlenbeck: Slaveholder and Abolitionist
Among the list of subscribers to the Address to His Royal Highness of 1816 is a person called C. C. Uhlenbeck, whose name appears fourth on the list of 107 Dutch inhabitants and Burghers in Colombo.9 The Uhlenbeck fam- ily, who trace their roots to Germany, became well established in the Netherlands and appear prominently in a published account of famous Dutch families. The life of C. C. Uhlenbeck is recounted by his grandson, who was a professor at Leiden University. C. C. Uhlenbeck was born in Colombo in 1780 and died in 1845. His father, Captain Johan Wilhelmus Uhlenbeck, was originally from Prussia. It was then quite common for Germans to join the Dutch armed forces and serve as mercenaries in the
ImagePoint Pedro
Jaffna
N
Mannar
Vanni
Arippu fort
Kalpitiya
Anuradhapura
Nuvarakalaviya
Trincomalee
Koddiyar fort
Puttalam
Dambulla
Thamankaduwa
Polonnaruwa
Hath korale
Chilaw
Kurunegala
Matale
Bintanna
Batticaloa
Peradeniya Kandy Mahiyanganaya
Negombo
Niyamakanda
Hanguranketa Gampola
Colombo
Kalutara Beruwela
Nuwara Eliya
Sri Pada
Ratnapura
Badulla
Wellassa
Kataragama
30 km
Galle
Matara
Hambantota Tangalle
Kingdom of Kandy
Dutch maritime provinces ceded to the British in 1796
Figure 2.1 Sri Lanka in the early nineteenth century. Capital letters indicate disavas or districts. Italics indicate mountains and forts. Others are cities.
Dutch East India Company. Johan Wilhelmus Uhlenbeck entered the ser- vice of the VOC as a soldier in 1768, rose to major, and ended his career as commandant of Galle. He died in Colombo in 1810.10
Christianus Cornelius Uhlenbeck would have grown up in Colombo in a house where slaves performed a number of domestic tasks. The will of Maria Wilhelmina Gildemeister, his widowed mother, contains an explicit mention of a slave: “To the male slave of the testatrix by name January an
3%
1%
1%
23%
72%
Burgher Sinhalese Tamil Muslim Unknown
Figure 2.2 Ethnic distribution of proprietors (author’s data from NA UK CO T71/663)
amount of thirty rix dollars, and the testatrix declaring further to emanci- pate him from slavery and desired therefore that the said legacy and the slave certificate of the said male slave should be given to him one month after the decease of the testatrix.”11
Christian Cornelius became a cadet at the age of eleven and remained in the military until 1796, after the surrender of Colombo to the British. Later, rather than returning to the Netherlands, he worked as a civil engineer under British rule, but after some years he left this function to work as a wholesaler in Colombo. From the documents relating to his life in The Hague National Archives, he appears to have mingled with both Dutch residents and English authorities and acted as an effective spokesperson of the Dutch when they had grievances to be put forward to the government. His grandson wrote that his greatest merit was that together with “his friend Rajepakse,” the mudaliyar of the Mahabadde (cinnamon peelers caste), he was instrumental in bringing about the liberation of slaves. During his time in Colombo he owned four slaves—Jacob, sixty-five years; Jans, twenty- one years; November, twenty-four years; and Susannah, sixteen years.12
Other records indicate the presence of domestics in the household, among them Celestina, who was baptized as a Roman Catholic in 1805.13 For the “education and promotion in life” of his children, however, he thought it desirable to leave the island with nine of his children, his wife, Catherine Elizabeth Andringa, and his sister, Mrs. Gratien, and informed the chief secretary of his intention to take a ship in Galle called the Cerberus to return to the Netherlands via England.14 In spite of a shipwreck that stalled him in the Cape, he eventually returned to the Netherlands, where he became burgermaster of Voorburg. He died in Delft in 1845. He left eight sons and four daughters; all sons enlisted in the Dutch colonial army or the navy.15
The source of C. C. Uhlenbeck’s alleged activism regarding the aboli- tion of slavery in Sri Lanka is possibly the farewell address of eighty notables in Colombo dated December 30, 1820, in which he is praised as one of the most virtuous and beloved men in his hometown, Colombo. The text of the address is worth quoting as it refers to his involvement in emancipa- tion through his action to ensure “that the newborn of enslaved people are freed from the yoke of slavery.”16 Slavery was considered an evil while colonialism was implicitly construed as a liberating ideology that kept the enslaved in a sort of tutelage until they were ready to become subjects of the empire, devoid of any “free” voice but endowed with a limited “free” choice in the colonial labor market.
The Dutch Burgher Union Journal of 1933 gives us some insight into the way Uhlenbeck’s act was remembered and projected by his descendants for posterity. They emphasized a single fact in his life—the performance of a benevolent act of liberation—neglecting to explain the possession of slaves until then, something that in the case of less generous proprietors perdured until 1844. Under the heading “Slavery in Ceylon” comes a snapshot view of Uhlenbeck’s life in a British crown colony:
Slavery was abolished in Ceylon on the 20th December 1844. It is however very much to the credit of our Dutch ancestors that they voluntarily liberated their slaves in 1817 or 27 years before they were compelled to do so by law.
Dr C. C. Uhlenbeck, retired professor of Leiden University, states that his grandfather, who was son of Major Uhlenbeck Commandant of Galle, was one of those who interested themselves in the liberation of slaves in Ceylon, and that a document relating to this event, signed by eighty notables of Colombo, is treasured among his family papers.17
Upon his return to the Netherlands in 1820, Uhlenbeck did not play a role in a fledgling antislavery movement that was creating waves in Brit- ain and the United States. This was not unexpected. In many ways the Netherlands stood out as a place where there was hardly any interest in the plight of slaves, and only rare antislavery rhetoric was heard in the Dutch public sphere. A few well-known personalities, such as Betje Wolff, had expressed opposition to the slave trade and slavery in the late eighteenth century, but these isolated voices failed to spawn an abolitionist organiza- tion until the 1840s, when informal circles and liberal clubs emerged in Utrecht and Amsterdam.18 On the whole, Dutch abolitionism was small- scale, cautious, and late as compared to the British and American move- ments.19 W. R. van Hoëvell’s Slaves and Free Men Under Dutch Law (1854), the most read abolitionist publication in the Netherlands, failed to claim political or social equality for slaves and continued to conceive of black people as less developed than whites.20
The son of C. C. Uhlenbeck, C. H. Uhlenbeck, who was born in Sri Lanka but returned as a child to the Netherlands with his father in 1820, became minister of the colonies in a liberal government from February 1, 1862, to January 3, 1863. During this short period he passed the law of August 2, 1862, to abolish slavery in the West Indian islands of Aruba, Bon- naire, Curacao, Saba, St. Eustacius and St. Maarten, and Surinam. The law took effect almost a year later, on July 1, 1863. In Suriname, owing to the large population of enslaved peoples employed in the plantation system, the law mandated state supervision of the emancipated slaves, a form of appren- ticeship, for a maximum of ten years. Slaveholders received compensation money that amounted to sixteen million guilders, ironically financed from the profits earned from the cultivation system based on forced labor in the Dutch East Indies.21 Slavery was abolished in all directly ruled territories of the Netherlands East Indies (Indonesia) in 1859 without much noise, as con- vict labor gradually replaced slaves in the workplace. In the cities, freed slaves often continued to provide domestic services, albeit as free workers.22
Indigenous Slaveholders
The ethnic distribution of slaveholders in the slave registers of Colombo indicates a large proportion of local slaveholders. Other sources confirm that indigenous people employed enslaved men and women in various
capacities, thus emulating the way of life of Burghers.23 In many testamen- tary cases of indigenous wealthy landowners and businessmen in the nine- teenth century, enslaved people appear amid jewelry, land, and household items as moveable property, either passed on to inheritors or sometimes emancipated and endowed with a parting gift.24 Yet the presence of slaves in the lives of indigenous households in the southern maritime provinces is invisible in the historical rendering of the nineteenth century. Wickre- maratne states categorically that the majority of slaves who lived in the towns of the southwestern seaboard were owned by Dutch Burghers.25 Wills and deeds of transfer, however, show a sizable number of enslaved people in local homes and mansions (walauwas). In the late eighteenth cen- tury Moor and Sinhalese elite in Galle owned slaves. As Kate Ekama has demonstrated, emancipation deeds provide evidence of Sinhalese holding of slaves, if surnames such as Perera, Rodrigo, and Fernando are interpreted as evidence of Sinhalese ethnicity.26
Don Francisco Dias Abeywickrema Bandanaraike from the Matara dis-
trict diligently registered his domestic slaves and their children in 1818. His antecedents are most probably traced to Don Francisco Dias Wijetunge Bandaranaike, born in 1720 and mudaliyar of Hewagam korale, and Don Christoffel Henricus F. Dias Abeyewickreme Jayatileke Seneviratne Ban- daranaike, who was mudaliyar of the governor’s gate and of Siyane korale East.27 The slave register of 1818–1832 gives the following list (F and M stand for the gender, and the number is an indication of the age):
Amilia otherwise called Sebela F 58 emancipated by owner Babby F 27.7 child Catistery not free
Camba M 14.7
Callua M 20.1
Celesteny F 21.7
Cethy F 26.7—Sabina F, Adirizema M Calloo 23.7—Catharina F (died)
Cartha F 17.7—Juama M, Wattoemaide M Castury F 10.7
Collondy F 17.7—Saberidi F, Sancha F, Juliana F, Adirra M (emancipated by proprietor)
Calloo otherwise named amma F 47.7 (emancipated by proprietor) Dingy F 37.7—Ramassua F not free
Isacua M 20.7
Jacostria M 23.7
Paatma F 25.7—Sankindy F, Sarah F, Sanchia M, Mitto F, Senkindy F Rosina F 7.7
Sompania M 7.7
Seekka F 8.728
We can learn very little from these names. Were they local pauperized peo- ple compelled to sell themselves or their children to the landed proprietors at times of famine or crop failure, or were they bought from across the coast or from even further? What type of work did these slaves perform for their proprietor?
The wills of slaveholders provide some clues as to the labor that was extracted from slaves in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The will of Nicholas Dias Abeysinghe Amarasekere (no. 1343, May 21, 1792), head mudaliyar of the gate in Dutch Ceylon, begins with a detailed explanation of what should happen to his slaves upon his death: “The tes- tator desires that his slave maids Kaluda and Amelia shall remain with and serve his youngest son Abraham until he become of age or attain any qual- ified state when it is his desire they should be made free and at the expense of the testator’s estate and their deeds should be delivered over to them such expenses being paid to the Deacon’s Fund.”
The church played an important role, as in the Cape, where fees for manumission were paid to the church. Freedom was not evenly distrib- uted. The mudaliyar listed the names of slaves that should not be sold but would have to remain and serve his children for their entire lives: “Sumi Mira, the girl Sapra, the maid Amaldie and her daughter Rabja and Man- chey, the children of the deceased Madalena named Katrnecha, Peena, the maid Ano and her son and one daughter, Abraham, Salman, Abea, Adena, Natto, the slave boys Antho and Phillipuwa, the maid Marco with her son and daughter Joan and Royattah.”29
In an earlier, handwritten version of this testament dated November 23, 1783, in the National Archives of The Hague, two of the eight pages are dedicated to the future of the slaves, thus revealing their importance in the household of their owner.30
Nicholas Dias Abeyasinghe lived in Dangedera near Pokunawatta in the Galle province but also owned a walauwa at Silversmith Street in Colombo and a walauwa at Katunayake, so his slaves could have been domestic slaves—“maids” and workers in the “gardens” of his rural abode are referred
to in the will. As the governor was encouraging native headmen and oth- ers with capital and an entrepreneurial spirit to engage in agriculture, in 1784 Dias Abeyasinghe had come to an agreement with the VOC that he would develop an estate in the northwest of Galle called Diviture, plant- ing paddy, cinnamon, coffee, and pepper. He was given an investment from the company, which he was supposed to return after five years.31 The maha- mudaliyar had succeeded in attracting to his estate a labor force of poor and lower-caste people to whom he gave land to live on and till. But after the initial five years there appears to have been some compulsion exerted for them to continue working for him.32 There is nothing, however, to prove or disprove that these were slaves or emancipees.
The will of Claudina Perera Ekanayaka, widow of Seneviratne Illanga- kon Kodituwakku Mohandiram, who died on September 27, 1816, and the joint will of herself and her husband were filed in the provincial court of Matara, as Case No. 3359. Both wills were written in Dutch. The transla- tion reproduced by P. E. Pieris shows that the enslaved remained in an ante- chamber of freedom for two generations after the death of their masters, as though complete autonomy was not conceivable:
The testatrix declares to be her desire that the above said the slave Catto with her three children Leno, Bale and Dingy Baby, should be obliged not alone to remain and serve by the survivor of the testa- tors, but also to be subjected to serve under their above said chil- dren, Dona Anna de Zaa and Don Matthys de Zaa, with the restric- tion that they should be treated as faithful free declared slaves in the manner the equity did appertain.33
Deeds also indicate that slaves were purchased in southern India and brought to Sri Lanka. Louis de Saram Maha Mudaliyar of the Governor’s Gate bought a boy called Maden, renamed Lourens, on December 30, 1728, from a vendor called “The Chetty Joan” for the price of 12 rix dollars in Tuticorin.34
The account of Dona Ana’s estate of the Illangekoon family in 1780 lists the slaves with their names and value: Rosetta female, 50 rix dollars; Kali- estie, 60 rix dollars; Mado and child, 60 rix dollars; Pinne, male, 100 rix dollars; Katto and daughter, 170 rix dollars; and Wattoe and daughter, 344 rix dollars, between the lands she owned and the jewelry.35 In 1835 eman- cipation of slaves was already a near fait accompli, as the will of Don Petrus
Abeysiriwardena Ilangakoon Maha Mudaliyar testifies. In this she refers with affection to her faithful emancipated slave woman Baby and bequeaths to the latter’s children, Saarchy, Kaatchy, January, Siripinay, and Francina, a field of one amunam in the Girway Pattoe and six coconut trees from the garden Jamboeghahwatte at Noepe, for which Baby would receive the profits until the children were of age to support themselves.36 Little more is known on the relationship between enslaved and slaveholders. In con- trast, it has been the subject of a lively debate among historians of South Africa, with Robert Ross, for instance contending that there was no sense of being part of a “family” in a slaveholding household.37
In the early nineteenth century a class of new rich hailing from all castes and ethnicities and who had acquired wealth and education began to emulate the lifestyle of a new rich class, who in previous centuries had been the interpreters for colonial rulers.38 For their collaboration they had been rewarded with land and honors. Both these groups enjoyed a “feudal” lifestyle aptly described by, inter alia, Patrick Peebles, Kumari Jayawardena, Michael Roberts, and Anoma Peiris.39 The old rich group was epitomized by the Bandaranaike-Obeysekeres, who were committed to retaining their status based on landed wealth and loyalty to the British.
During the first decades of British rule in Sri Lanka, the economy “remained precapitalist and rudimentary with some export of natural prod- ucts, a low level of trading and shipping activity, low productivity in agri- culture and few manufactures.”40 European merchants did nothing more than adapt to existing structures, and no major innovations in the econ- omy or society were apparent during this period of mercantilism. The British held on to the cinnamon monopoly until 1833, and the need for revenue compelled them to abide by the system.41 There was little change in the sources of revenue from the early nineteenth century to the early 1830s: land rents, cinnamon, grain tax, pearl fishery, duties on spirits, fish rents, capitation tax, stamps, salt monopoly, and tolls were the main earning mechanisms during this period. Corvée labor was used to build the roads, and then a road tax was introduced.
While the Dutch East India Company was not favorable to an accumu-
lation of property by Ceylonese, which it saw as a challenge to its own mer- cantile enterprises, the final years of Dutch rule and the beginning of the British witnessed a growth in the titles acquired by Ceylonese. Peebles sug- gests that during these years and in the confusion of Anglo-Dutch wars, the Dutch sold land for revenue and to increase the production of cash crops
while Ceylonese made a grab for government-owned spice “gardens” in the Colombo district.42 The first governor of British Ceylon, Frederick North, was hopeful that granting land to the natives would develop agri- culture and make the colony viable. He created a Survey Department, abol- ished service tenure, ceased to enforce corvée labor, and introduced a tax on rice cultivation. Thomas Maitland, North’s successor, reversed most of these policies but made new ones that consolidated the rights and obliga- tions of private property. The governor could issue free grants of land at his own discretion, and before 1833 more than 50,000 acres of land, mostly areas that had been Dutch “gardens” planted with spices in the late eigh- teenth century, were partitioned into small plots and issued to Ceylonese. The recipients of these plots were both large landowners and villagers. From the list of grantees of more than 50 acres of land, it is clear that the major- ity were traditional local officials of high family status. The British believed that these grantees would be able to enlist agricultural laborers to work on their lands and develop them. This period saw the creation of a category of landed proprietors with large landholdings where laborers were called to work in the name of rajakariya (corvée), according to witnesses heard before the Colebrooke-Cameron Commission.43
Among the list of large landowners in the first decades of the nineteenth
century compiled by Patrick Peebles, six were signatories of the 1816 dec- laration to emancipate the children of their slaves (see table 2.1).44 There is a possible correlation between slaveholding and land utilization for
TA BLE 2 .1
Large Landowners in Early Nineteenth-Century Sri Lanka
Grantees Number of grants Acreage
P. Perera 5 264.2
C. de Saram 1 104.0
M. Perera 6 212.0
D. H. Dassenaike 3 88.6
A. de Saram 2 56.2
D. S. Ameresekera 5 52.0
M. Gomis 2 63.7
Source: Patrick Peebles, “Land Use and Population Growth in Colonial Ceylon,” Contributions to Asian Studies 6 (1976): 70.
Image
Figure 2.3 Deed of transfer of slave, June 30, 1809 (SLNA Lot 7/2133 with permission of Sri Lanka National Archives)
agriculture, but clear evidence of the use of slave labor in the spice gardens is yet to be discovered.
During the first fifteen years of British rule, slaves continued to be sold and bought in the presence of notaries, such as Adrian Vandort or Richard Morgan. Just as for any property, it was necessary to sign an official deed
of transfer sanctioned by a notary that traced the past proprietors of the slave. A “certain slave boy named Abel” was held by Pieter de Almeida “as appears in the Notarial assignment made to him by J. C. Koelman dated at Bentotte the twenty eighth day of March One Thousand Eight Hundred and Six.” In a subsequent deed drawn up and sealed by Notary Richard Morgan, the slave boy was legally transferred to Paulus Perera for the sum of 150 rix dollars in the presence of a witness J. H. Lourenz.45
The stories that follow relate to enslaved men and women like Abel, who accidentally enter the official archive for a segment of their life.
The Murder of Valentine, a “Malay” Runaway
In 1797 an enslaved man called Valentine went to the market a little out- side the Colombo Pettah to buy some flowers. There he met his wife or companion Clara, also an enslaved person, and together they set out on the high road to Mahradan (Maradana) to the house of someone described in the court records as “the Malay sultan.” Some men were waiting for them in the hut next door. Clara and Valentine had left their bundle of clothes and Clara’s two rix dollars in the hut as they and another runaway male slave were planning to flee to Galle with the help of these men.The slaves and the men left together, walking in a row in the moonlight. Sud- denly the men asked them to stop walking as they wanted to chew betel. On this road, surrounded on both sides by the jungle, Valentine was killed and Clara fled into the jungle. Three years later, when the Supreme Court tried two men for the murder of Valentine, the fate of the other runaway would be revealed.
The period is of some importance. The year 1797 was a time of trouble for the British in Sri Lanka as they encountered resistance to their rule from the local people. In September 1795 the British had captured the strategic harbor of Trincomalee in the east of the island, and in 1796 they proceeded to expel the VOC from the parts of the island that had been under their control since 1658. The government of the maritime provinces was then vested in the government of Fort St. George (Madras), and control in Sri Lanka was handed over to the military, led by Colonel James Stuart.46 The headmen deemed responsible for the troubles were dismissed from admin- istrative office, with the probable exception of those from the Salagama (cinnamon peeler) caste, and replaced by the Amildars and their assistants,
known in popular parlance as the “Malabar Mudaliyars.” This and other changes led to the revolt of 1797.47
The reading of the acts of 1796–1798 as a single rebellion and the need to locate them in a longer continuum of resistance against the colonial state and link them to the abolition of service tenure and imposition of a new tax on coconut gardens has been dealt with elsewhere.48 What is impor- tant to understand here is that these disturbances provided a context for Valentine to consider running away from Colombo and starting a new life. Robert Percival described Colombo as a European city, “built more in the European style. The interior of the fort has also more the appear-
ance of a regular town.” The houses are “regularly built, less than one story high,” and the windows have glass panes, Venetian blinds, and shut- ters. Most houses have verandahs as a refuge “from the sultry rays and people spend much time in this space.”49
Running away and providing help to runaway slaves was a crime under Dutch colonial rule under ordinances issued in 1663, 1674, 1677, 1757, and 1786. The regulation of May 31, 1757, in Colombo and July 4 in Galle— “Plakkaat waarbij de Straf-Maatregelen tegen het weglopen van slaven uit de Vier gravetten en het verlenen van hulp aan weggelopen slaven bekend gemmakt worden” (Declaration announcing the punishment for runaway slaves from the Four Gravets and for providing help to runaway slaves)— was translated into Sinhalese and Tamil.50 There is little information on the number of slaves in Sri Lanka who fled by foot and the extent of their success during the transition period from Dutch to British rule, although unsuccessful runaways appeared in criminal records of all Dutch territo- ries from Sri Lanka to the Cape.51 In Sri Lanka, for a slave whose appear- ance was that of an indigenous person, it was sufficient to run away to a distant place where he or she was unknown and begin a new life there. If their destination was Galle, Valentine and Clara were probably planning to travel by boat with the help of the assassins. We do not know what trig- gered the escape—perhaps a chance meeting at the market, since both Val- entine and Clara appeared to be free to wander in the city of Colombo, or simply the window of opportunity offered by a change of rule. In 1797, one year after the fall of the Dutch, did Valentine know that he was no longer subject to the draconian rules of the VOC concerning escaped slaves? The court case of February 1800 surrounding Valentine’s murder three years before discloses little about the victim. Was he courageous, reckless, or simply seizing the occasion of a loosening of power? His body is described
as that of a young man below the age of thirty. He was possessed by Cap- tain Olke Andringa, who appears to have had a large staff of servants and at least three slaves, Primo, Sooco, and Valentine. Andringa’s life is better known than that of his slave. He was born in Kuinre, Netherlands, in 1741 to parents dealing in wood and building supplies. In 1764 he married Geesje Stam, with whom he had eight children. After he joined the VOC as a sailor in 1759 he went on seven voyages to the Dutch colonies. Going up the ranks, by his final voyage to the colonies in 1779 he was master (schip- per) of the Hoogkarspel. By 1785 he was working as a sea captain in Colombo, until he was discharged from service in 1795 and became harbor master of Colombo. After his first wife died in Colombo, he married Magdalena Strobach, a widow who possessed a large group of slaves. Two daughters appear in the records. The elder daughter, Catharina, born in 1789, was probably the daughter of Magdalena’s first husband. Catharina later mar- ried C. C. Uhlenbeck. The younger daughter, Agneta, was born in 1801 and was more likely Olke Andringa’s daughter.52
Olke Andringa, according to Clara’s testimony, was the first to be informed by Clara of the events, and he immediately went to the jungle in search of Valentine. Once Valentine’s body was found, it was brought back to the fort.
Clara describes Valentine as talking in the “Malay” language with his assassins. Her statement comes to us in translation. What term did she use to qualify Valentin’s language in the language she herself spoke, which could have been Sinhalese, Tamil, or Portuguese? The British used the term Malay in a loose and unqualified manner to describe people who they believed had roots in the East Indies. The Dutch had used the term Ooster- lingen (Easterners), together with the term Javanese, to describe people who had been living in Batavia before migrating to Sri Lanka. People from Southeast Asia were far from strangers in Sri Lanka. Reverend Philippus Baldeus mentions in 1672 the presence of Bandanese and Javanese soldiers on the side of the Dutch and Sri Lankan rulers. Apart from being soldiers in the colonial armies, they were often anti-Dutch political exiles and con- victs sent from the Indonesian archipelago.53 The lives of political exiles from ruling families, such as the Javanese king Amangkurat III of Sura- karta, exiled with his retinue in 1704, or the sultan of Gowa, in 1767, have been discussed in numerous publications. The close connection of the Malay people with the Dutch and then the British army, as well as the Ceylon Rifle regiment formed for Malay soldiers by Governor Frederick
North, is evidenced in military histories. Yet the presence of enslaved peo- ple from Southeast Asia in the maritime provinces of Sri Lanka since the mid-eighteenth century is scantily addressed and remains generally little known.54
By the early nineteenth century, most enslaved people in Colombo who had lived in the island for a number of decades generally spoke Portuguese. Percival remarks that Dutch ladies spoke a vulgar Portuguese probably due to “their frequent and familiar intercourse with their slaves.”55 Valentine, however did not converse in Portuguese. Since slaves were still traded and brought to the island until 1799, it is probable that he had been brought there recently enough for him to remember his mother tongue, a language spoken in the East Indies that the court translator described as “Malay.” According to Percival, “The Dutch, to avoid the expense of keeping coast servants, introduced the practice of rearing slaves of the African casts, and employing Malays who made excellent cooks and gardeners, and indeed good servants in every respect, although they were kept for a trifle in comparison of the others.” He contrasts the dress of the slaves with the attire of the Malays of noble descent. “While Malays of a higher rank wear a wide Moorish coat or gown which they call Badjour . . . most of the slaves in the service of Europeans, instead of the piece of cloth, have breeches of some coarse stuff given to them by their masters.”56
Together, as the court account suggests, Valentine and Clara went to the “house of the Sultan” in Cinnamon Gardens and left their small bun- dle of clothes. The name of the sultan remains unknown, but he would have been a member of the noble families exiled by Dutch rulers from one of the Spice Islands. Official documents of 1792, for example, list 176 indi- viduals belonging to 23 families of royalty and nobility exiled together with their families from Java and Sumatra to Sri Lanka.57 The Indonesian exiles lived in the prince’s quarters (Kampung Pangeran) in an area close to the Wolfendhal Malay quarters. It is possible that the sultan’s house was the residence of the former sultan of Gowa, who was deceased. His widow, Siti Hapipa, remained there at least until 1807.58 The exiled sultan Fakhrud- din Abdul Khair al-Mansur Baginda Usman Batara Tangkana Gowa, the twenty-sixth king of the Gowa Sultanate of South Sulawesi, reigned from 1753 until 1767 and was banished by the Dutch VOC to Sri Lanka in 1767 on a charge of conspiracy with the British to oppose the VOC trading monopoly in eastern Indonesia. Might Clara and Valentine have visited the sultan to seek redress from some injustice? Might the Malay assassins have
been connected to the sultan? The motivation for the murder might have been more complex than understood at the time.
Clara, for her part, was the slave of a Mr. and Mrs. Bruckner, the for- mer appearing as a witness in the case against the two assassins, Bankanna and Dannah, for the murder of Valentine. A servant of Andringa mentions that Clara was previously called Cornumba, which suggests she was bought recently by Bruckner from another slaveholder and renamed. After having initially recognized the accused, Clara later retracted her statement, which she claimed she made “for want of sense.” She did, however, claim that the three assassins were Malays. Once again the term is vague and perhaps lost in translation—we do not know what term she used in her testimony.59
Clara’s account of the events three years after they happened is incon- sistent and frayed, a feature that the reasonable mind of the judge was quick to point out. Clara describes the weapon as a “stick as long as her arm and as thick as her waist.” Yet both victims appear to have been stabbed. The other person who joined Clara and Valentine to flee was a slave of Ser- geant Bahre. Clara describes seeing Bahre’s slave hit by a Malay man and dying, but she also states that she ran away as soon as Valentine was attacked. Her claim that she informed Olke Andringa himself is contradicted by his statement when he asserts that he missed Valentine at night and, feeling sick at the time, had sent off two servants, David and a gardener, to look for him. They, rather than Clara, informed Andringa that his slave had been murdered. Clara, it seems, never recovered her clothes and money, for as she had returned to collect them from the sultan’s house, she was, accord- ing to David, “threatened with unbecoming terms in the Malay language.” After that she had fled into the jungle.
Less is known about the other victim. His owner, Gerhard Hendrick Bahre, appeared before the criminal court on February 12, 1800, and tes- tified to the murder of his slave on June 23, 1797. He confirmed that the men charged were not suspects at that time; instead, an old Malay man had been taken in by Provost Marshall Sutherland.
Of the accused, too, little is known, except that they were “Malay” and soldiers. It appears that Bankanna was a soldier in the company of Lieu- tenant Langvalle. Many Malays served in the Dutch army and thereafter joined the British forces. Some of the soldiers were emancipated slaves. The Dutch government sometimes gave freedom to slaves in its employ in exchange for joining the army. A Malay company made of deportees and
thirty-one slaves was thus created in 1763, blurring the lines between slave origin and army military lineage of the Malay community. In the same manner, freed slaves formed a large contingent of the expedition of 1781 to invade the Kandyan kingdom during Governor Van de Graaf’s term, and in 1786 “Eastern slaves” were emancipated and made into a company of militia.60 When Colombo fell to the British, it was decided that the Malay prisoners of war, rather than being sent to Java as suggested by the Dutch, would be sent instead to Madras to be part of the British military establishment. After the Treaty of Amiens, when Sri Lanka became a crown colony, Governor North took measures to absorb Malay troops into the island’s military.
Pinning murder on Malays was quite common, as Malay men were believed to be naturally disposed to violent acts. Percival speaks of the “ferocity of the disposition” of the Malays and their propensity to take opium, get involved in murders, and run amok for revenge.61 Further- more, Malays were perceived as murderers in Sri Lanka, owing to the murder in 1799 of the last Dutch disava of Matara, Pieter Willem Ferdi- nand Adriaan van Schuler, and his wife by a Malay, who was a “servant” according to Hussaimiya and a “domestic slave” according to R. G. Anthonisz.62 Anthonisz notes that the slave “had secreted himself in the sleeping chamber for the purpose, and . . . used his master’s own sword, which was hanging on the wall by the bed.”63 This type of incident only confirmed, for those in positions of authority, the Malay people’s propen- sity to violence, a deep-seated orientalist and psychologized reading of their character.64 The case of the Slave Island murder of 1723 described in the first chapter may have also contributed to the creation of this stereotype.
In the end, the court found Bankanna and Dannah not guilty but put them on remand to be tried for other offenses. The archive thus gives only part of the story and leaves many gaping holes on the motives of the mur- der of Valentine and the role played by the sultan in these events.
Selestina
The story of Selestina is similar to that of many other enslaved women who experience violence in the bedroom, the workplace, or the field. These sto- ries have been forgotten by the historiography pertaining to early nineteenth-century Sri Lanka, even by gender historians. There is a sense
that one has to respect the limits of what can be known. Yet there is a duty to report these counterhistories as scandals revealing the excesses of colo- nialism as everyday practices. Though the colonial archive reports the life of subaltern women only at moments of aberration and Selestina is a failed witness who utters only a few words, her story betrays a certain familiar- ity. Excessive violence in the small hut where she lived was the norm. The ordinary was a continuous life of pain and humiliation. It was only the death of a child that made it worthy of being recorded. The archive is made of other matters—matters of state that involve the men who commit the violence—so the pain and oppression Selestina and others suffered has to be pried out of texts produced by the oppressing powers of state and patriarchy. It is in court cases and reports on court proceedings that these voices can be heard, albeit faintly.65 The layered nature of the colonial archive and the possibilities it offers in reading echoes and whispers and silences have been explored in a rich body of work that is an inspiration to force the archive and capture the precarity of Selestina’s life.66
Women of color belonged to two marginalized groups. Gender and race combined to make them invisible. In the colonial archive they appear through the prism of the voice of male slaves or slaveholders; in the regis- ters they appear as names often distorted by the hand of a culturally insen- sitive colonial scribe, as a gender encompassed in the letter F, and as an age. The gender ratio among the population of enslaved people as it appears from the slave registers of Colombo points to an imbalance between women
and men: there were 348 slave women and 284 slave men.
This was a patriarchal society where social and economic powers were concentrated in the hands of the slaveholder. Added to this vulnerability, women were also exposed to the pressures of male slaves who came from similarly male-dominated societies. Imposed nonconsensual sex was a nat- ural condition in a household composed of masters and enslaved people. Scholars have often linked sexual violence and homosexual activity by slave men in Cape to the ratio of men to women among enslaved people which, was approximately 4 to 1.67 Feminist historians have disputed these con- clusions and asserted that sexual violence is about domination rather than fulfilment of a libidinal need.68
Selestina of Colombo was, according to the words of the sitting magis- trate of Colombo on January 21, “charged with having murdered her child.”69 On January 18 Gabriel, the servant of J. L. Cramer, secretary of the sitting magistrate in the Colombo district court, informed him that
3
284
348
Male Female Unknown
Figure 2.4 Gender distribution of slaves in Colombo (author’s data from NA UK CO T71/663)
202
107
119
123
45
45
17
2
5
250
200
Number of slaves
150
100
50
0
Age of slaves
Figure 2.5 Age of slaves in Colombo (author’s data from NA UK CO T71/663)
“his slave girl Selestina had been brought to bed of a child which she had thrown into the necessary,” a euphemism for the toilets. These words tes- tify to the confusion between a narrative version of an event and a literal version. Clearly Cramer was narrating an event he had not witnessed, yet he was confident enough to assert that the child had been “thrown.” Upon the return of Cramer from the Pettah, he claimed he had instructed the child to be “extricated,” but later testimonies suggest that his staff had already acted to try to save the child before his return. Selestina was taken into custody by J. Ebert, the constable of St. Sebastian Street. A medical attendant who had presumably visited the mother and child in jail testified in court that the child was alive but “in a weakly state.”
Constantia, described as a Roman Catholic, whose function in the house- hold is not indicated but seemed to be one of some authority, stated that at 7
p.m. she saw Selestina going from the necessary to a room detached from the house, and that from her “manner” she suspected that she had delivered a child. Constantia had entered the room, where she found Selestina “with her cloth drenched in blood.” Selestina had first claimed that the blood came from her period, but then Constantia had sent Maria Silva to the nec- essary to check. Maria returned and stated that a child was crying at the bottom. Sarviel and Maria took a light and found the child and, “having collected people,” a person called Noor—a Muslim name—descended into the necessary, took the child, washed it, and gave it to its mother. The child was covered with excrement and there were traces of blood on the planks of the seat of the necessary. Blood was flowing from the navel and the top of the head prior to the child being cleaned. The child had been dropped nine feet and fallen on the filth, which “was not very deep as it had been cleared six months since.” There were no marks of violence except a scratch on the nose. The child seemed at that point to be very weak and appeared unlikely to survive.70 The afterbirth was found in Selestina’s room, so it seemed that Selestina had delivered herself. She was examined by the medical officer, M. Mack, to ascertain whether she was fit enough to go to jail.71
The child, a boy, died at 4 a.m. on the morning of January 20. He was examined by Mack and midwife Sittee—possibly a Malay Muslim—who filed reports on the death.72 The secretary of the court reported the state- ment of Sittee, described as a Mahomedan in the court record. She had gone to Cramer’s house at the request of Constantia around 7 p.m., and Selestina and the child were brought to the room. Selestina explained that “something like a ball had dropped from her into the necessary.” Sittee
confirmed that the child was full term and the birth was natural.73 The doctor, however, stated that Selestina would have delivered herself “by forc- ible means” since the navel string was broken, and the child must have died from loss of blood. Upon his first examination, however, he had con- firmed that there were “no violent marks on the child’s body” and only “a slight blue mark on the chin.”74 Cramer expressed surprise at any sug- gestion that “his slave girl” had the intention of getting rid of the child.75 Noor, who had rescued the child, stated that the child was then alive and covered in filth so no blood could be seen. He surmised that injury would have been caused by the fall.76 Selestina’s testimony as it was reported con- firmed the narrative of the others, including her description of feeling something like a ball drop and then losing her senses until she went to the room adjoining Cramer’s house. The magistrate brought to the notice of the court that Selestina had already had two children. Selestina added she did not do this “intentionally.”77 She then was committed for trial before the Supreme Court for having murdered her child.
The trial, which would have taken place before Chief Justice Sir Hardinger Giffard, did not actually take place, as Selestina appears in a list of prisoners as a female slave, of twenty-two years, Roman Catholic (fig. 2.6). Below her name is scribbled “discharged without prosecution,” dated February 1822.78 Selestina’s life thereafter is unknown.
Image
Figure 2.6 List of prisoners, Supreme Court circuit for Colombo, February 1822 (SLNA Lot 81 with permission of Sri Lanka National Archives)
Before the tragic events of 1822, Selestina’s name appears in the slave register for Colombo, which diligent slaveholders used to confirm posses- sion of human beings. In 1818 she was eighteen years old, and no children were registered under her name. We do not know what she looked like or the color of her eyes. Her master, Cramer, owned two other slaves, Jisa- belle (female, twenty) and Spadetje (male, thirty-eight).79When were Seles- tina’s other children born, who fathered them, and what happened to them?80 The unsaid is revealing. At no moment in the proceedings does the magistrate question Selestina on the paternity of the child, which would be a natural concern. Was it to avoid the embarrassment of hearing the name J. L. Cramer? At no moment is there any sense of surprise or con- sternation that a twenty-two-year-old slave woman would have given birth to three children out of wedlock. The relationship between male slave- holder and enslaved working in the home is not alluded to, but in 1803 Robert Percival, in The Account of the Island of Ceylon, describes the Dutch women he encountered and their relationship with enslaved women. He touches on the cruelty displayed by them on occasions:
Dancing is the principal amusement of the younger women: while the chief pleasure of the married and elderly ladies consists in paying formal and ceremonious visits to each other. To these visits they go attended by a number of slave girls, dressed out for the occasion. These girls walk after them carrying their betel-boxes, or are employed in bearing umbrellas over the heads of their mistresses, who seldom wear any head-dress, but have their hair combed closely back and shining with oil. Their chief finery consists in these female atten- dants, and their splendour is estimated by the number of them which they can afford to keep. These slaves are the comeliest girls that can be procured and their mistresses in general behave very kindly to them. With that caprice however, which always attends power in the hands of the ignorant and narrow minded, the Dutch ladies frequently behave in a very cruel and unjust manner to their female attendants, upon very trifling occasions, and in particular on the slightest suspi- cion of jealousy.81
Dutch paternalism vis-à-vis slaves was also subject to doubt by Percival when he noted that Malay slaves to the Dutch had “on account of ill treat- ment made their escape to the Candian territories.”82
J. L. Cramer’s name was listed among the Dutch inhabitants and Bur- ghers of Colombo who were subscribers to the address to the prince regent for emancipating children born of slaves after August 12, 1816.83 Little is known about Cramer and his relationship with his slaves. It was, however, not uncommon during the early years of British rule, when few British women traveled to the colonies, for European men to marry or have liaisons with local women or women of mixed descent. This continued the policy of Portuguese and Dutch colonizers who on occasion promoted mixed marriages. After the fall of Jaffna and Colombo, two hundred Dutchmen were reported to have married women of Indo-Portuguese origin. Whether these unions were coerced or free is not known.84 The presence of Indian domestic slavery under company rule in the subcontinent has been revealed in studies of inventories and wills written by Anglo-Indians. Slaves appear, sometimes unnamed, under the designation of “slave boy” or “slave girl,” reduced to itemized objects, and at other times as slave-concubines and inti- mate parts of British households.85 Had Selestina’s child survived, he would have been freed from enslavement upon reaching the age of fourteen and joined the mixed-race community of Burghers or Eurasians.86
The fact that Selestina had already had two children makes it difficult to accept that she did not know she was carrying a child. The fact that she had cut the umbilical cord herself shows that she saw that what she described as a “ball” was a child. We do not know if the child was dropped intentionally, but other, similar slave narratives lead one to speculate that the child may have been the product of rape. Rape was until 1855 a crime punishable by death in Sri Lanka as in any other British colonies, together with forgery, arson, sodomy, carnal knowledge with a child under ten, and abortion.87 Just like many violated and enslaved women, Selestina may not have wanted to bring a child into a world where he would not be free and would surely suffer bodily harm. Slavery was antithetical to family, wom- anhood, and motherhood. The juridical narrative is blank on her motives but hints toward a strategy of survival. When Selestina claims that she had lost her senses and makes the point clearly that the child was not dropped intentionally into the necessary, she is in effect putting forward her defense.88 In many ways, historical fiction such as Toni Morrison’s Beloved or Yvette Christianse’s Unconfessed, a fictionalized account of the story of Sila van den Kaap, who was sentenced to death in April 1823 for killing her nine-year-old son Baro, fills in where the archive falters.89 Turning to fic- tion means veering toward subjectivity and trespass on the boundaries of
the conventional archive of professional historians. For this reason we have no accounts of subaltern women under colonial rule, although accounts of the construction of native women’s sexuality by colonizers and local elites have been scrutinized. In general, native women were circumscribed by colonizers and local elites in a domestic sphere where their main duties were childbearing and looking after the home.90 This is why infanticide was seen in the society in which they live and labor as the most horrendous crime, the ultimate perversion. For Selestina to kill her own child meant facing the opprobrium of her entourage, which leads one to imagine that she felt a sense of complete desperation and absence of hope in the future if she committed such an act where she risked prosecution. Her defiance was not covert, oblique, or symbolic, as was often the case in more repressive slave societies.91 Selestina’s act must be looked at as part of the ordinary life of an enslaved woman rather than an interruption of it or an aberration.
Two Stories from Galle
Ameensa from Cochin
On July 26, 1800, Ameensa appeared before the Supreme Court at Point de Galle, the city that lay on the coast in the lush, wet southern province of the island, where Valentine and Clara were hoping to reach. She stood there on behalf of herself and her daughter to claim freedom from a Galle merchant, who affirmed that she and her daughter were his lawful slaves. The court declared that Walle Odiar Tirewa Nainde Markar had unlaw- fully kept her in slavery and was called to appear before the Supreme Court together with another merchant called Mapola Tambi of Colombo and a Galle resident called Lebbe. Lebbe was under arrest as he was the last per- son who claimed ownership over Ameensa.92
For over five hundred years before the arrival of the Europeans, Galle had been a place of trade for Arab merchants who sailed along the coast of Lanka. The Portuguese established a small trading post in Galle in the early sixteenth century and eventually, pushed away from Colombo by King Rajasingha I, had to withdraw there and build a fort to guard the harbor. In March 1640 the town succumbed to the attack of the Dutch and became the VOC’s first administrative base. Galle was the most important port for the VOC, the seat of the first Protestant church and for some time the headquarters of the Dutch
government, with a sizable population of Dutch officials, settlers, and clergy.93 After the capitulation of Colombo in 1796, only nine hundred Dutch inhabit- ants remained in the entire island. British forces took Galle a few months later in a peaceful manner, with the Dutch commander Fretz having made arrangements to disarm the Dutch garrison and receive the British troops at the fort. Captain Lachlan Macquarie, who led the military conquest of Galle, describes it in this manner: “The Dutch Garrison paraded, presented their arms and piled them afterwards with the utmost regularity and order, on the Grand Parade within the Fort, fronting the British detachment which was formed on the same Parade opposite to them.”94
On August 1, 1800, Ameensa, also called Afsnoema, began telling her story to the court. She was born in Cochin, in Arne in the dominion of the Nawab, and remained there for ten years, then went to various places on the coast. She was married to a Patan—a term generally used in South India to refer to Deccani Muslims—named Afsinga from Dasoo in a ter- ritory also under the Nawab. She lived with her husband in Seringapatam and had many children, of which only one remained with her, a daughter of eleven years called Khadirtah. Her husband was, in her own words, a commandant under Tippoo Saib (Tipu Sultan). He was wounded in the wars and died in the service of Tipu Sultan at a place called Kneculmal- lee. After his death she remained for a month at Serangipatam and then left. She had no support. She walked for fifteen days to a place called Palghat, also in the dominion of Tipu Sultan, where she remained three months.95 There she stayed in the house of Syed Mookheiden but provided for herself. From there she moved to Cochin. A woman called Cun- dooma “invited her to live there.” For twenty days she supported herself and her daughter but lived at Cundooma’s. Ameensa’s voyage to Galle would begin here.
Ameensa had found herself caught in the last wars that the kingdom of Mysore was waging against the British East India Company. Her origins were, however, in Cochin, a coastal town that since 1760 had been under the suzerainty of Haider Ali and from 1782 of his son Tipu Sultan. In 1794 or 1795, if her own sense of time is correct, her husband, an officer in Tipu Sultan’s army, had died in a place called Kneculmalee. A few years later Tipu Sultan himself would be killed fighting at the Siege of Serangapatam when the British, helped by the Nizam of Hyderabad and the Maratha forces, stormed his fortress. The British took large parts of the kingdom and ended the Mysorean power in the southern Deccan. This event spelled
a complete change in Ameensa’s life. As a widow without resources except probably her savings, she was gradually becoming destitute and feeling the precarity of her life.
In Cochin Cundooma “gave her in charge” to her son Mapola Tamby, who was then in turn “in charge” of taking Ameensa to Colombo. Ameensa describes how she and her daughter were escorted to a ship by Cundooma and from there sailed to Galle. Before leaving her, Cundooma had prom- ised that in Galle Ameensa would “get everything she needed” and also that she would visit now and then. Ameensa declared that she had not signed any papers. This was, she said, “seven months before the English took possession of this place, full six years ago.” The dates are important as they indicate that Ameensa reached Galle when the island was still under VOC rule, seven months before the 70th Regiment of the British Forces led by Captain Macquarie took control of Galle on February 23, 1796. She was then brought to the house of one of the accused in the case, referred to as the prisoner Lebbe. Before that, she mentioned to the court, she had appeared before a magistrate, presumably a Dutch official, who had ruled that since she was a subject of Tipu, she should be sent back “over the waters.” But Mapola Tambi took her again to his house and the same day on board a ship. No explanation was given as to what happened on the ship. Ameensa lived in the house of Mapola Tambi for two months as his guest. After that he had delivered her to Lebbe, whose house was in the fort, introducing him as the “son of a brother,” and said that he himself was going back to Bellingham. Two years later Ameensa appeared before the magistrate to complain that her daughter was being punished by depriv- ing her of “victuals.” Furthermore, when she had complained about her daughter’s treatment to Lebbe, he had threatened “to have her hair cut off and her head shaved.”
Ameensa had heard with astonishment that Lebbe had bought her daughter. On an occasion when he had beaten her daughter, she asked him to give her back and get back his money from Tambi. He told her he had bought the daughter for 150 rix dollars and that when she paid that, she would be free.
Claims and counterclaims followed in succession. A year and a half after she had been left in the home of Lebbe, Ameensa had requested and obtained that Tambi be brought before Commandant Agnew (Major Agnew).96 His (presumably Tambi’s) eldest brother was then put in prison. Six months later Ameensa was herself put in jail for a day, and when released
again she was “offered for sale.” The court then moved on to assessing whether Ameensa was a slave, asking for proof of enslavement from those making claims on her, and calling other witnesses as well. The accused then produced in court two translations of slave bonds.
The renter of the sea customs was called in to testify about the boat on which Ameensa arrived in 1795 with Mapola. He recalled that fourteen or fifteen slaves came onshore and Mapola paid the duty; they came in a com- pany ship and had regular papers from Cochin. He did not recognize the woman and daughter because “they were all so lean” and only took an account of them. Jan Jacques David D’Estandin, fiscal of Galle in 1795, explained the procedure:
It was reported to the fiscal that slaves were imported and they were subject to a duty of 10 rix dollars per head then the proprietor was at liberty to sell them. It was the custom to transfer them by endorse- ment on the same paper. If there was only a certificate in the Moor- ish language it was necessary to have the slave brought before the magistrate and that he should declare himself a slave and a new act made out. . . . The permission of the Cochin government was required but the Captain in the Company ship was supposed to check papers before boarding a slave.97
The extent of slavery in the Galle district is known to us from the list of signatories to the 1816 statement, although under the Galle listing are included slave proprietors from Matara, Tangalle, and Hambantota, which does not allow any analysis relating to the city of Galle. Among the signatories there was still a majority of Dutch inhabitants and Bur- ghers in spite of the fact that in 1807–1808 many of them returned to the Netherlands or sailed back to Batavia following the Prediger mission, which was sent to the island by the Batavia authorities to pick up the remaining VOC employees.98 The following list is an emic taxonomy that reflects the self-perception and location of individuals in ethnic categories of the period.
dutch inhabitants and burghers
E. De Ley
J. H. Brechman
P. A. De Moor
J. P. Rabinel
J. S. Augier
J. A. Wittensleger
J. Rose
J. H. Roosmalecocq
P. H. Roosmalecocq
J. Poulier
J. H. Meurling
A. V. D. Brocks
W. Aldons
D. Loret
W. Stroef
E. M. Degen
J. J. Engelbregt
J. Waltzell
H. A. Bogaars
P. Z. Andriessens
C. Hollebeek
H. Puttenaar
C. V. Houten
A. De Silva
L. H. Anthonietz99
D. A. Dias
T. S. D. Abeysekere Harmanus
J. D. Silva Bacobus Jansz Floris Jansz
N. R. Keuneman Amelia de Meis
cingalese
D. B. Illangakoon
D. B. Wandigediwakere
D. S. Perera
vellales
D. B. Illangakoon
G. J. Illangakoon
Don Simon Sammerewicre Kaamewickreme Don Philippoo Bandernaike
moor
J. Miracando
The slave registers of 1818–1832 do not provide information on the eth- nic identity of the proprietors. The ethnic categories I have used in the list are purely based on the surnames provided and are for this reason very ten- tative. They do show, however, a certain pattern: while the number of Dutch inhabitants as slaveholders is predictably much smaller, one sees a much larger group of local slaveholders. The names of the slaves are diffi- cult to decipher as they were handwritten. The age of some slaves was not included. In the list below, “M” indicates male, “F” indicates female, and the number indicates the slave’s age.100
Slaveholders in Galle and matara
Muslim/Moor
Ahlamon Lebbe Markar: Alalia M 39; Bebee F 48; Miran M 42; Miran M 34; Pakival F 35; Pakivoal F 35; Sinnevel F 37
Afsin Naynna Canacapully
Ismael Lebbe Markan Sultan Suybar: Palleadun Secadi Markar Sedder Lebbe Markar: Castorie F 35
Mianagna Markar Udouna Lebbe Markar: Maira Candoe M 12; Pak- eer M 30; Pakiervel F 14
Alema Nataka: Mambey F 40 Samsee Lebbe
Slema Lebbe F 4
Mira Nayna Larkar Noocana Lebben Markar: Jummabaronmoer M 30 Audoes Lebbe Sinne Lebbe Markar: Mathem Candoe M 56; Sinnevel F 45: Salem M 44
Ahamadoe Natechiea: Harithoe F 35
Mira Nayna Larkar Noocana Lebben Markar: Jummabaronmoer M 30
Audoes Lebbe Sinne Lebbe Markar: Mathem Candoe M 56; Sinnevel F 45; Salem M 44
Sinhalese
Don Bastian Jayatilleke Attapattu, mudaliyar: Casandra F 45; Dingey F 28 and 3 children; Loesa M 27; Samelie F 44 and 5; Sinne F 40 and
1 child
Don Abraham Dias Guard Modl: Libina F 60; Anthony M 35 Mevan Pirknan: Afsnenna M 30
Lem Fernando Lindo Miked Canden: Slematie F 43 and 5
Burgher
Mr J M Anthonys: Selphia F 45
W de Vaas: Philida F 22; Rosina F 8, Selvia F 58
Mrs Wegen: Jesmine F 40; Malathi F 36 and 2; October M 40; Sophia F 68
Mr van Hek: Margues M 40 Mrs Ludivice: July M 47
M Engelbregt Cannega F 35
Muslims/Moors
Slaveholders in matara
Ibrahim Lebbe Mihideen Lebbe: Allema F 15; Coongy Umma F 37; Patchier not free—declared free by Prov. court; Handgy F 17; Rukutty F 10
Moottokoddy Lieene Atchi Hema Lebbe Udiema Abbemar kan: Car- tha F 38
Sadhakho Lebbe Markar Segoe Abul Rasy Lebbe Markar: Calindar M 34
Sinhalese
Henrick de Saram Mudaliyar; Andia M 14; May M 50
Don Francisco Deza Abeywickrema Bandaranaike: Amilia otherwise called Sebela F 58 emancipated by owner; Babby F 27.7 child Catis- tery not free; Camba M 14.7; Callua M 20.1
Celesteny F 21.7; Cethy F 26.7 – Sabina F, Adirizema M; Calloo 23.7—Catharina F (died) ; Cartha; F. 17.7—Juama M Wattoemaide M; Castury F 10.7; Collondy F 17.7—Saberidi F, Sancha F, Juliana F, Adirra M (emanc. by propr.); Calloo otherwise named Amma F 47.7 (emanc. by propr.)
Dingy F 37.7—Ramassua not free; Isacua M 20.7; Jacostria M 23.7; Paatma F 25.7—Sankindy F, Sarah F, Sanchia M, Mitto F, Senkindy F; Rosina F 7.7; Sompania M 7.7; Seekka F 8.7
Don Constantin Wickremesinghe Ameresekere Mudaliyar; Babea M 25; Dinga M 38
Upon the testimonies of all the witnesses, the court was cleared and the prisoner, Lebbe, found not guilty. Signing in the “Malabar language,” however, he renounced all claims on Ameensa and her daughter, who were declared forever free. With this sentence and their newly regained freedom, the rest of their lives remains unknown to us. Ameensa’s appeal to the court system in British Ceylon at the precise moment she felt that her situation was no longer tolerable shows that her resistance to the sta- tus quo was motivated by something akin to moral outrage rather than a wish for freedom.101 Clearly, notions of justice and injustice born out of societal religious and ethical values of the limits of permissibility perme- ated enslaved people’s attempts to deal with their condition. What is evi- dent is that participants in these struggles invoked no universal principles, which invites historians to shift the frame from one that supports the emancipation process by abolitionists, one embedded with imperial notions, to the frame inhabited by the actors involved. We need to remain sensitive to the fact that exerting one’s personal choice need not be understood as an index of freedom, as it is conceived in liberal thought.
Ameensa’s story points toward little-known migration patterns of sub- alterns between India and Sri Lanka in the early nineteenth century, a movement caused by landlessness, war, crop failure, and famines in South India that preceded the large-scale migration of labor with the opening of coffee and tea plantations in the following decades. From the turn of the century, the colonial state in Sri Lanka had made use of an immigrant workforce from South India for public works, mainly roads. Indeed, Gov- ernor Frederick North’s pioneer corps in the early years of the nineteenth century consisted of Indian immigrants.102 The proximity of the island to the subcontinent suggests a regular flow of landless agricultural laborers from India before the coffee planting years. Ameensa’s story is thus unique only insofar as it has been recorded.
Louis Badgamege, Kidnapped in Kallehe
The outcome of the case of Louis Badgamege, age nine, kidnapped in Kallehe, near Galle, in 1813, tried by the Admiralty Commission in
Colombo on May 17 of that year, is closely related to the adoption of a Slave Trade Felony Act by the British Parliament in 1811. This act was passed a few years after the act abolishing the slave trade in 1807 because it was felt that the penalties under the Abolition Act were not commensu- rate with the crimes committed. The Abolition Act relied on a system of fines for its enforcement. The Slave Trade Felony Act, instigated in Parlia- ment by Henry Brougham, member for Camerford, made the removal or assistance in the removal, transportation, and shipment of slaves by British subjects or in British territory a felony. The legislation also provided increased penalties of imprisonment and hard labor to between three and five years or transportation for fourteen years.103 In terms of the number of prosecutions, however, the impact of the Admiralty court system was negligible.104
Vice Admiralty courts were established in various ports of the Indian Ocean from 1801, including in Colombo, Calcutta, and Bombay. More scholarly interest has focused on the mixed commissions for the suppres- sion of the transatlantic slave trade, in particular the Sierra Leone court, as a precursor of an international human rights court, as it was composed of judges from different countries who attempted to apply international law.105. In Sri Lanka the Felony Act had a negligible impact, but the single slavery case brought before the Vice Admiralty court in Colombo in 1813 is inter- esting in its own way as a descriptor of the times. Rarely does history record the voice—even filtered—of a frightened nine-year-old child under colo- nial rule.
The Admiralty Commission comprised Governor Robert Brownrigg as chief commissioner and Supreme Court judge Alexander Johnston.106 A grand jury of twenty “gentlemen” was sworn in, among them some familiar names, including Anthony Bertolacci. The twenty men were English, as it was decided that only Englishmen could perform the duty of indicting British subjects.107 In 1813 Dutch Burghers were already sitting in juries, a measure that had been suggested by Sir Alexander Johnston in 1806 when he was Puisne justice and eventually adopted in 1810–1811 fol- lowing the Return Orders and Regulations Touching the Supreme Court of Judicature in the Island of Ceylon in Pursuance of His Majesty’s Char- ter dated August 6, 1810, and 1811. In accordance with Governor Mait- land’s insistence, the jury was to consist wholly of Europeans in the trials of Europeans and “persons born of European parents.”108
The hearings were held in Colombo. The people who “were summoned from Galle” to attend them were paid a batta (a small fee in cash) to com- pensate their travel, and seven hundred rix dollars were required by the advocate fiscal to this effect.109 The grand jury, after retiring to deliberate, presented several bills of indictment since more than twelve jurors were convinced that there were grounds for a trial. The six indicted (three of whom were British subjects) hailed from a variety of Indian Ocean loca- tions: an officer of an Arab ship, who was a native of Mocha in Arabia; a Malay priest from Malacca; a lascar from the Malabar Coast; and two Mus- lim men, Lebbes from Galle and a Burgher from Galle. The first proceed- ings took place with double interpretation, in Tamil for Ahmed Cassim Patchiren, accused of having carried on board the ship Johan Banny in the harbor of Galle the child Louis Badgamege, and in Dutch for the jurors of the “petit jury,” who were all “Dutch gentlemen of Colombo.”110
The vessel was sailing from Malacca through Bengal and was bound to Mocha, an important slave market.111 For dhows sailing the Indian Ocean, it was a common practice to collect a few slaves bought by sailors or fish- ermen and trade them in markets at Mocha or other Indian Ocean ports such as Zanzibar. These slaves could be sold for work on coffee plantations or as household servants, dockhands, tailors, pearl divers, or soldiers in the Persian Gulf or, from then on, sold to merchants who might take them to Arabia or Bombay.112 In southern Sri Lanka it was a time of scarcity. The father of Louis, called Simon, living in Kallehe near Galle, had sent his son to the bazaar to buy “tobacco, salt and fish with one fanam and a half.” En route Louis was enticed by a man who offered him cakes and sugar, locked him up, and promised to take him to a ship where he would be fed with rice and sugar and then brought back home. Instead, the child was clad in a “Muslim costume” and kept below deck. His father searched for him for three weeks, traveling from Galle to Matara and Colombo. The child in his “Mussulman dress,” described as “trousers and a muslim cap,” was spotted on the ship by a fisherman, Omoor Lebbe Lakkier Tamby, a neighbor of Simon, who upon the request of the child informed his father. Simon called on the collector, Mr. Hooper, for help; Don Abraham, an arachchi (headman), and two lascarins (soldiers) were sent to the boat with Simon and rescued him. Hooper then went on board himself to verify the information that other children were also captive and discovered fifteen Sinhalese children, “many of them concealed under fire wood and cables”
and all except two clad in “Mussulman dress.”113 The defense put forward the argument that abduction was in fact an act of compassion toward starv- ing children whom they intended to send back ashore before departure.
The witnesses hailed from a variety of communities. The man who saw the boy on the ship was himself a Muslim. His testimony showed his soli- darity with the father, whom he accompanied when the boat was searched. Don Abraham, the arachchi of the collector of Galle, was also present during the search and provided matter-of-fact testimony, unlike the emotional neighbor, who mentioned that the boy pointed to the accused and said he had received ten rix dollars from the captain for providing him. Don Abraham, on the other hand, said he heard nothing of any money exchange.
The testimony of the boy is illuminating in many ways. We learn that Ahmed Cassim Patchiren was a frequent visitor to his home and that he enticed him with the promise of “a great quantity of biscuits, rice and jag- gery.” Louis saw the owner of the ship, whom he calls Moyedeen, giving the prisoner ten rix dollars. The boy had then boldly asked the reason for this transaction, thus showing his lack of fear and grasp of the situation in which he had fallen. He clearly understood that he had been “purchased by a lascar belonging to the ship.” Tamil was spoken between the prisoner and the owner, a language the boy did not comprehend. Louis knew he was sold into slavery, but his imagination created other fears of the unknown: “I understood I was to be carried to the country which the ship was going, which was inhabited by giants and cannibals.” He noticed that he was the only boy who was not allowed to go onshore and deduced that in his case there was a risk that someone would recognize him. He con- tinued describing his change of identity: “I wore a particular dress: I fan- cied by putting it on that I was to change my religion: I do not know what religion I was to assume. The people onboard told me that we had become their slaves and then we must profess the religion which their slaves pro- fessed. A Cingalese lascar onboard told us we were to be slaves and no lon- ger to be Cingalese.”114
Louis understood parts of the conversation between the accused and Moyedeen. They spoke, he said, in “Maurs,” and some words were “Hamien Jaga Ranera Jaga,” which he thought meant that he was not to get much rice. The child had asked Ahmed Cassim Patchiren to take him back onshore. We learn that the prisoner might have had a pang of guilt, as he had tried to take the child onshore, even offering to give the money back
to his buyer. What were then his intentions? But Moyedeen was adamant about keeping the boy.
Simon confirmed that Ahmed Cassim Patchiren was in the habit of com- ing to his house with another Moor “to buy jackfruit, and other things of that sort, as there was a great scarcity of food.” The fact that Simon sus- pected that someone had stolen and sold his child suggests that this was a common occurrence. He had then made secret inquiries so as not to give prewarning to the parties involved. Ahmed Cassim Patchiren, who gave his version of the story of the boy willingly following him and wanting to remain on the ship, was found guilty.
On May 18 the trial of Jacob Pieters, “a Portuguese Taylor” indicted for carrying away two of the boys found on the ship and sending them into slavery, took place in Colombo. One of the boys, Appuhamy, related how he and his brother Babay had gone to meet their older brother Andries to get some food—rice and maldive fish—when they were accosted by the prisoner. Pieters had offered to employ them to carry toddy for three rix dollars a month. For three days they were kept in his house, fed, and given toddy, before being taken to a ship. There they were left in the charge of a man called Maline, from whom Pieters had received five rupees. The accused, Pieters, was found guilty on both indictments.115
Ephemeral moments in the lives of Valentine, Clara, Selestina, Ameensa, and Louis snatched from an archive of violence open a rare window into a hidden world and what it meant to live as a colonized and enslaved person in a port city such as Colombo or Galle in the early nineteenth century. They offer a counterpoint to sterile state narratives replete with edicts and figures. These individuals, when confronted with situations that took them to police stations and law courts, encountered collectors and magistrates who were probably also slaveholders, as well as Burghers, Sinhalese, Mala- bars, Moors, Toepasses, males, and females, a collection of people who harbored many identities that overlapped and relentlessly combined, thus challenging the uniformity of “being” that is so sharply inscribed in colonial official documents. From the acts of resistance performed by our protagonists, ideas and practices of race, sexuality, equality, justice, free- dom, or rights were similarly differentiated in the realms of labor and home. Reading the acts of the runaway Valentine and the enslaved Ameensa, Louis, and Selestina does not allow much more than specula- tion on what motivated their individual struggles. Louis’s story provides a
counternarrative to the common descriptions—especially in European travel accounts—of desperate natives selling their children at times of great scarcity, revealing the actions of a grieving and loving parent, search- ing for his child and succeeding in liberating him from the clutches of slave traders.
How was freedom conceived in the minds of the enslaved? What were the limits of the permissible for an enslaved violated woman? On what terms, on what turf did they resist? Was a yearning for freedom the trigger or something else? Owing to the difficulty in culling such stories, few his- torians have tried to unearth singular struggles of enslaved people, more frequently turning their attention to collective attempts at flight or resis- tance. These are read as a move from unfreedom to freedom, something out of the ordinary for scholars of both Southeast and South Asia who high- light the prevalence of bondage as the norm in the societies in which the enslaved lived.116 The unfreedom-to-freedom continuum as an analytical device is perhaps not the most suitable to think with. It encapsulates a lib- eral vision of an ideal society where freedom is conceived as autonomy and a lack of social bonds and assumes that people in non-Western societ- ies accustomed to bondage were not generally susceptible to aspire to free- dom in the liberal sense. It also ignores the possibility that an individual could display a unique form of agency motivated not by a dream of free- dom but by a perception of being unjustly or unfairly treated. What the fragments of the lives of these individuals gesture toward is the need to turn to the particular if one wants to grasp the complex nature of being colonized and enslaved in the Indian Ocean world.117
CHAPTER III
Slave in a Palanquin
Jaffna in the Early Nineteenth Century
I presume that you have a large number of dead serfs whose names have not been removed from the revision list.
NIKOLAI GOGOL 1
Tout pouvoir, y compris celui du droit se trace d’abord sur le dos des sujets.
MICHEL DE CERTEAU 2
I
n 1819 a Coviyar slave named Cander Wayreven was whipped under orders of the collector of Jaffna, the highest British official in the area, for traveling in the palanquin of his master, thus going against what
was conceived as the prevailing law and allegedly overstepping his posi- tion and status. Interestingly, this punishment was immediately contested as illegal by the Supreme Court sitting in Colombo. Prudence, however, was in order. Exposing evidence of human injustice and an act of cruelty was never at stake. The epistolary debate among collector, governor, and Supreme Court judges revolved solely around the just interpretation of the law rather than around issues of morality or right and wrong. While these legal luminaries purported to represent and uphold the sanctity of their own reading of the law, they did not question the violence of the law against colonial subjects or the rooting of the moral project of law in the everyday violence of caste and social hierarchies.3
This event is a window into the governmentalizing form of colonial- ism of the period, when the main aim of British rule was to consolidate its grip on the island and devise strategies to police its new subjects. Wayreven’s punishment brings to light the corporality of colonial power, evidenced in the need to leave enduring scars on the back of a young man for a crime that today would seem incomprehensible. It also illustrates the complicity of certain colonial officials with the local dominant groups, whose power over slaves and others rested on “age-old” customs. It finally reveals that
[ 89 ]
in spite of the ambivalence displayed by British officials in Sri Lanka to defend and uphold antislavery and proabolition policies initiated in the metropole since the beginning of the nineteenth century and endorsed by a few liberal colonial officers, small spaces of resistance were opening in Jaffna society in many different and unusual ways. A bold young man rid- ing the palanquin of his master, fearless of the whip; a family of slaves wear- ing jewels and standing proudly in front of the Nallur temple, where they were prohibited from entering owing to their status; female slaves taking their masters to court for failing to register their children’s birth and free- ing them under the Act of 1818; and men like the Nalavar slave Minjen fleeing Jaffna to take refuge in the Vanni in order to join the rebel Panda- ram Wanni were all events that occurred in response to a muted message of freedom that was slowly reaching even the least fortunate people of Jaffna. This awareness of British liberalism’s rejection of slavery gave enslaved peoples the psychological thrust to act. People’s dreams of justice were clearly caught up in the law. The regime of compensation to slave- holders that was put in place with the Act of 1821 and the manner in which this act was put into practice are a fascinating and until now an unwritten chapter in Sri Lanka’s encounter with British colonial liberalism. However, the way in which the law reworked normative worlds and imaginations of justice is less our concern than the effects of abolition acts on people’s lives, desires, practices, and actions.
A Place in Time
The Jaffna peninsula is mostly surrounded by the sea and connected to the rest of the landmass by a small strip of land. A string of islands pepper the waters of the Palk Straits reaching out toward India. This location permits the peninsula to rule the waterway between the eastern and western coasts of India. The vital force of the sea that Fernand Braudel described when referring to the Mediterranean drew “into its orbit all regions that look seawards” and gave the region its particular coherence.4 Its history is one of a coastal region that looked seaward for its commerce and trade and attracted people from overseas as diverse as merchants, priests, travelers, corsairs, fishers, conquerors, and slaves. Borrowing from the words of J.
C. Heesterman, however, it was not a frontier zone that separated and enclosed the Jaffna peninsula but rather its “permeability” that allowed it
to develop in this particular manner, sometimes flourishing owing to a thriving maritime and commercial activity driven by the annual monsoon winds and other times falling into decline, as during a destructive Portu- guese rule.5 Europeans, defined Jaffna by the sea, as were the two other maritime provinces, Colombo and Galle, that were conquered between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. Unlike these two maritime areas, which were peopled essentially by Sinhalese, Jaffna was recognizably the land of Tamil or, as they were called then, Malabar people, in the same way as people of the southern coasts in the Indian subcontinent.
Across the sea was India and the Coromandel Coast, the root of the word itself being from a corruption of “Cholomandalam,” a region that was part of the Chola Empire. It encompassed more specifically the eastern coast- line that stretched from Point Calimere in the south to Ganjam in the north, dotted with significant ports such as Bimlipattinam, Masulipattinam, Armagon (where the British established a factory in the 1620s), Pulicat (under Dutch control), and Fort St. George, or Madraspattinam.6
James Cordiner’s Description of Ceylon (1807) refers to the garrison town of Jaffna and its surroundings as “fruitful” and benefiting from “a regular trade with the opposite coast of India.” The country around Jaffnapatam, he wrote, “is flat, the scenery rich and the rides delightful. Fields of wav- ing green, enriched with luxuriant groves, and enlivened by purity of air The soil is fertile and the constant verdure allays the heat.”7 Emer-
son Tennent, who was colonial secretary of Ceylon from 1845 to 1850, described the scenery of the peninsula: “The sand, which covers a vast extent of the peninsula of Jaffna, and in which the coconut and Palmyra palm grow freely, has been carried by the currents from the coast of India and thence washed on shore by the ripple, and distributed by the
wind.” He further admired the arable soil, which was endowed with “a deep red colour, from the admixture of iron,” and signals the fertility of the land: due to the “lime from the comminuted coral, it is susceptible of the highest cultivation, and produces crops of great luxuriance.”8
The Vanni
Jaffnapatam, as it was called by the Dutch, covered the entire peninsula up to Trincomalee in the East and the island of Mannar in the West (fig. 3.1). To the south was the large province of Vanni, a flat land of dense jungles,
Valikamam
Point Pedro
Vadamarachchi
Chundukuli Manipay
Vannarpannai
Uduvil
Varani
Navatkuli
Jaffna
Kopay
Nallur
Tenmarachchi
Pachilappalai
N
15 km
THE ISLANDS
Pooneryn
Kilinochchi
Pallavarayankattu
Mullaitivu
VANNI REGION
MANNAR
Figure 3.1 Jaffna and Vanni
small rivers, and lagoons, which under the British was composed of the district of Vavuniya and part of Mullaitivu. Colonial officials marveled over the scenery of the Vanni, and J. P. Lewis referred to the way “the atmosphere seems to dance and sky and water to merge into one in the far distance.”9 The area was ruled by semi-independent chieftains called Vanniyars. These chieftaincies, located between the kingdoms of Jaffna and Kotte, emerged in the fourteenth century as a result of the collapse of the Polonnaruwa kingdom.10 Under the Dutch, the local chiefs were nominally subordinated to the commandment of Jaffna and required to pay a yearly tribute of forty elephants to the company. Yet they were autonomous in many ways, and as the eighteenth century came to a close, obligations to pay the Dutch their tribute became less enforceable. After rebellions and punitive actions, the Vanni provinces were forcefully con- quered by Lieutenant Thomas Nagel, to whom the colonial government leased the district for five years.11 The Vanni was very much a frontier region where escapees could lose themselves in the forests, but it was also the victim of raids by rival kingdoms in the north and south.
If a Palanquin Could Speak
The Archaeological Museum in Nallur, a small building nestled behind the Arumugam Navalar cultural hall in Jaffna, displays side by side two nineteenth-century palanquins. One of them is described as “An Ancient Ladies Palanquin” made of wood and dated ca. 1820 (fig. 3.2). The caption says it was used by Mapana Mudaliyar in Atchuvely, Jaffna, and donated by his grandson Thikkam Selliah in 1948. Mapana Mudaliyar and his descendants were from early eighteenth-century Dutch rule in Jaffna, the main administrators of the Kandasamy temple in Nallur. I realized with some trepidation during a visit to Jaffna in July 2018 that the palanquin in the museum belonged to the same mudaliyar who was at the center of the palanquin controversy examined in this chapter. Was it the same ladies’ palanquin or a similar one, also belonging to the mudaliyar, in which a young Coviyar slave had traveled in 1819, causing a furor among Vellalars and unease among jurists?
If a palanquin could speak, it would give a testimony of the violence perpetrated against unfree people, the challenge posed to injustice, and the ethical compromises of the new rulers, upholding values of liberalism yet eager to maintain a status quo and avoid “disturbances.” As Talal Asad
Image
Figure 3.2 Palanquin ca. 1820 ( Jaffna Archaeological Museum with permission from the Department of Archaeology, Sri Lanka, copyright Abhijit Wickramasinghe)
brilliantly points out, a symbol is “a set of relationships between objects or events uniquely brought together as complexes or as concepts, having at once an intellectual, instrumental, and emotional significance.”12 The slave/ palanquin nexus of hierarchy and inequality of status is unique as some- thing that facilitated symbolic action. In other contexts the actual size of the palanquin also mattered to establish one’s privilege to a certain honor or disdain. In princely Mysore, gurus, heads of religious institutions called Mathas, traveled in an adda palaki (cross-palanquin), which had an axle that was horizontal and long, compared to the axle of an ordinary palanquin, which was shorter and parallel to the street.13 The slave in the palanquin episode illustrates the way things “recruited” a person into politics as much as a person recruited things in an intertwining with users.14
This case of a palanquin and a slave may seem trivial at first, an epi- phenomenon in the scheme of events of the century. For the historian, however, this episode allowed colonial archiving to happen and valuable testimonies of all the parties concerned—slave, slaveholder, collector, judge, governor—to be recorded and give hints to future researchers on how to reconstruct the ambiguous power relations and politics that shaped those decades. Yet there are many things that cannot be known, as we lack accounts by enslaved persons about their feelings and emotions at the moment they became free. We have only a sense of the monetary cost of freedom, something measurable since what was paid for freeing an enslaved person as well as the sum of money received by a free person for labor performed after liberty have been recorded. An understanding of a slice of a person’s life when the cusp of freedom was grasped can only come through examining what enslaved people did, how they acted, and how they performed, keeping in mind that the description of their acts come to us sifted through the words of the dominant men of the time.
Castes as Slaves
Many of the early ethnographies on social stratification in Jaffna dating from the 1960s and 1970s show the resilience of a system based on purity and pollution, where the Vellalars, the dominant landowners, employed a number of castes to service their various needs.15 There were, however, important differences between the degree of attachment between caste groups in predominantly agricultural villages, on the one hand, and in
artisan and fishing villages, where people had nonbound intercaste rela- tionships, on the other.16 According to Prashant Kuganathan, all people on the Jaffna peninsula, not only Vellalars, lived their everyday lives “through the lens of what they perceived to be clean and unclean.”17 Being a Vellalar acquired much prestige over time, as illustrated by the increase of the Vellalar caste designation as 37 percent of the population of Jaffna in the early nineteenth century to over 50 percent today.18 Over time, people belonging to other castes were incorporated into the operative caste sys- tem of the Vellalars in a fashion similar to the process that has been explored with relation to the Goyigama caste, the dominant caste in the Sinhalese areas. There Brahmin migrants were assimilated into the Goy- igama caste, with some placed in its aristocratic segment while others converted to Sinhalese-speaking priests.19 Ethnographies of the Jaffna peninsula indicate that castes that served the Vellalars were divided into the kutimai (service) castes, similar to the “right-side castes” of South India, who could not be bought or sold but had to perform various ritual and secular occupations, and the atimai (bonded) castes. Early scholarship on agrarian bondage in South India has revealed the variety in the forms of agrestic slavery and how widespread it was in the early nineteenth cen- tury.20 But while the presumed specificity and uniqueness of a “South Asian slavery” has been critically examined, less so the specificity of the Sri Lankan case, where local forms of bondage entangled with Dutch Indian Ocean slavery were dismantled by British regulations on aboli- tion.21 Indeed, during Dutch rule, by sanctioning and tapping into a per- ceived local practice of slavery, colonial rulers constructed and legally constituted Chiandos, Coviyar, Nalavar, and Pallar castes as “slave castes.” The reconfiguration of these caste groups as slaves was done through legal codification, administrative empowerment of local Vellalar elites, and liti- gation practices.
Portuguese and Dutch Rule in Jaffna
For two hundred years before the arrival of the Portuguese, apart from the first half of the fifteenth century, the Jaffna peninsula had little political contact with the Sinhalese kingdoms in the south of the island. While the Portuguese had spearheaded various punitive actions from Goa against the king of Jaffna in response to his intolerance and repression of Christians in
Mannar (notably Parava fishermen), it was a decisive moment when, in 1591, the king of Jaffna was dethroned and a Portuguese nominee installed in his place.22 Portuguese rule in Jaffna lasted forty years—from 1618, when Jaffna was annexed, to 1658—and was mainly characterized by violence perpetrated by the army and high taxation of local people. The peninsula’s numerous temples and the Nallur library were razed to the ground while the population was compelled to convert to Roman Catholicism. This was often only a nominal conversion since most reverted back to Hinduism once the Portuguese were routed by the Dutch, but for the members of the fisher caste conversion had a more lasting effect.23
Dutch rule followed from 1658 to 1795. A firm and controlled admin- istration was put in place that aimed less “at transforming the social system than at extracting from it as much as possible.”24 Under Dutch rule, the status of subjugated castes, especially the praedial castes Nalavar and Pal- lar, was defined as “slavery” in the Justinian sense, as the complete oppo- site of freedom. In what Alicia Schrikker describes as an “act of bold ethnographic-legal interpretation,” the Dutch applied their own rigid notions to the way the Nalavars were treated by their Vellalar high-caste masters.25 The seventeenth-century Dutch minister Baldaeus describes the Vellalars as agriculturalists in “verdant fields where grazed their cattle” and for whom worked “nasty” and “filthy” folk of inferior standing, among them the “Nallouas” (Nalavars), described as “slaves of the Bellales” (Vel- lalars).26 With the Dutch presence came an intensification of labor imported from India in the first instance, and from Southeast Asia in the eighteenth century. There was also a business interest in forced labor, as the com- pany owned enslaved people, trafficked them, and taxed the import of these people by other traders. At the same time, the VOC appropriated service labor in Jaffna just as in other parts of the country. In Jaffna, how- ever, slavery and caste-based service labor become closely intertwined. The company identified four castes as slave castes: the Chandios, Coviyar (Covias), Nalavar (Nalluas), and Pallar (Palluas).27
A seventeenth-century governor’s instructions regarding Jaffna provide
us with some understanding of the Dutch reading of caste hierarchies and difference: “The Wellales or highest caste must be treated with more con- sideration than the others: these are also the most obedient The
Nalewas Chewias have been slaves from remote times; they are employed as water carriers, house servants, palanquin bearers etc. . . . Labour is
provided by free men of the ‘Bellale and Madapally castes’ one day each month for the lord of the land.”28
When the Dutch took control of the Jaffna peninsula, they had to put down a rebellion in September 1658 led by the two other influential castes, Karayar and Madapalli, who had converted to Christianity under the Por- tuguese. This served the Vellalars, who emerged as loyal supporters of the Dutch, sharing with them their knowledge of the revenue-collecting machinery.29 A distinction was made in the eighteenth century between the Nalavar and Pallar castes, essentially praedial castes, and “the new coast slaves,” who were presumably employed as domestics by Vellalars and whose presence in Jaffna was more recent.
All other services must be rendered by the Nalewas and the Pallas (Nalavars, men of the climber or toddy drawing caste and Pallars or Pallas outdoor servants of the Vellales, as Koviyas were their domes- tics). These are slaves of the inhabitants who do not live with their masters, but apart with their wives and children, and only have to serve them during the time of ploughing, harvest, etc. The
new coast slaves live with their masters, and are clothed and fed by them and are therefore not called upon to do any labour for the Company.30
Apart from castes such as the Nalavars and Pallars that served the Vellalars, other caste groups who could not be bought or sold had to perform vari- ous ritual and secular occupations. They were skilled people, such as the goldsmiths, carpenters, blacksmiths, temple carvers, coppersmiths, potters, masons, washers, barbers, and Paraiyars.31 These castes were associated with the household of the Vellalars.32
The transformation of castes into slaves in the Roman sense led to “a monstrous growth of a slave-based export economy.”33 Jaffna was endowed with productive garden lands known as tottam, which were irrigated by fresh groundwater and thus independent of the vagaries of rainfall. The Dutch strategy was to develop tottam agriculture rather than rice, basing it on the labor of certain caste groups that they redefined as slaves and unfree labor imported from South India, adding to the number of slaves. Rice was imported to Jaffna, while the Dutch made large profits through the export trade of food crops and tobacco. The result was the growth of a
slave-based export economy in which Jaffna produced intensively cultivated palmyra products as well as onions, gourds, chilies, turmeric, pumpkin, and eggplants, in addition to tobacco. The Dutch profited from this import- and-export trade and made no attempt to curtail the social abuses it encouraged. Although tobacco was grown in Jaffna before the arrival of the Dutch, mainly for export to India and the kingdom of Travancore in particular, peasant farmers increasingly shifted to tobacco growing since they were guaranteed good sales and advances on the crop.
Castes and the Law
The story of the Coviyar slave riding in a palanquin is closely related to the prescriptions contained in Dutch ordinances that were collected into the Jaffna Compendium in 1704 under Governor Cornelis Joan Simons (1703–1707).34 Taxation and litigation combined with oppression were central to Dutch colonial rule, which was founded on social control and revenue extraction. Yet control could not work without a deeper under- standing of the natives. There had been continuous requests by the rural court (landraad) for detailed knowledge of local customs. It was in this context that, in addition to the collection of ordinances, the Thesawala- mai ( Jaffna customary law) was drawn up by a Dutch administrator, dis- ava Claas Isaaksz, in 1707.35 His report, translated into Tamil, was com- mented on by the twelve major chiefs in the region. It acquired the status of a foundational text for the Tamil population in the British period and became the source of much controversy during the ethnic conflict in the twentieth century.36 In Sri Lanka, as in other territories under colonial rule, Europeans gelled indigenous customary laws through close coop- eration with local elites. In India, however, orientalists believed that ancient texts, the Sastras and the Koran, were the source of authentic knowledge about an age-old custom and tradition. In Jaffna, by contrast, since there was no written text, the code was the outcome of the practical knowledge gained by Isaaksz in courts in Jaffna and the insights given to him by Vellalar chiefs. The outcome was naturally a text that consolidated the dominant status of the latter. The ascent of the Vellalar during the Jaffna kingdom from the thirteenth century onward is, according to S. Arasaratnam, charted in a sixteenth-century chronicle called Kailayama- lai (Mount Kailash), which describes their appointment as officials in the
kingdom.37 In the later colonial period their rise and consolidation as a distinct landowning community was closely related to shifts in their eco- nomic power, founded on the profitability of growing and trading in rice, tobacco, and palmyra. There were, however, a number of other landown- ing castes that counterbalanced the power of the Vellalars, the most nota- ble being the Madapalli, whom the Dutch appointed as collectors of rev- enue and mudaliyars. In 1760, of a total of 516 mudaliyars in the four provinces of Jaffna, 317 were Vellalars and 127 Madapalli. Gradually the Vellalar caste was able to absorb into its fold a host of other castes, includ- ing the Madapallis.38 The Yalpana Vaipava Malai (History of the kingdom of Jaffna), undertaken by Mayivakanan at the request of the Dutch gover- nor in 1736, remains a valuable source on the period in spite of its lack of dates and its mythical elements. While it focuses mainly on Jaffna kings, the tale of kings is punctuated with references to the migration of differ- ent castes within Jaffna, in particular the Nalavars.39
The Thesawalamai code had sections dealing with inheritance, pawn- ing, and transfer of property where explicit references are made to slaves and the slave trade. Slaves are described as transferable property that could be bought, sold, inherited, and manumitted according to the will of the slaveholder. In a single section, usufruct of cows, sheep, and slave women is dealt with, confirming a chattel-like feature of slavery. The legal posi- tion of slaves in Jaffna society was more ambiguous though, as demonstrated by the separate section devoted to the legal rights and obligations of slaves.40 Here the Thesawalamai code identified four slave castes—Coviyar, Chi- andos, Pallar, and Nalavar—under the category of slaves of Jaffnapatam, with each holding different historic foundations, rights, and obligations.
The first paragraph of the slavery section in the Thesawalamai explains how the Dutch appropriated service labor: the company would by custom be entitled to one out of five or six children—boys and girls—born of the marriage between a Nalavar or Pallar slave owned by the company and a slave woman from the countryside. These company Nalavars and Pallars would have presumably lived in circumstances similar to those of other slaves kept by the VOC in the island. For those Nalavar and Pallar slaves who lived in the countryside, the situation would have differed. They lived separate from their proprietors and made their living from agriculture. In these circumstances, it is possible that the slaveholders did not impose a continuous demand on their labor, even though they were in control. According to the Thesawalamai, young boys could be taken out of the
household to perform long-term duties for the masters, such as keeping herds.41
The end of the section in the Thesawalamai that discusses the rights and obligations of the slaves shows that the Dutch preferred to equalize the legal status of the Nalavar and Pallar to the enslaved they imported from over- seas. Here the relationship of manumitted slaves and their former masters is discussed, and whereas the mudaliyars claimed the right to punish man- umitted slaves if they publicly insulted their former master, the VOC stip- ulated that such cases were to fall under the provisions (slave code) of the Batavian Statutes.42
The changes in the law in the eighteenth century reveal a process whereby the lower strata of Jaffna society became even more rigidly con- trolled. Anthony Mooyaart, commander of Jaffnapatam, described the power dynamics in the following manner: “Those who have the power and are held in estimation by the authorities are like birds of prey who strip their victims to the bone of everything they have and leave them hardly their toes.”43
In 1829, in a petition written in Tamil and translated into English, a widow in Jaffna called Amarapati and her sister Cetupati wrote to com- missioners Colebrooke and Cameron to complain that their two slaves, named Kattai petti and Tampiyan, were usurped by an adigar of Karaveddi. The petition is not unusual in its nature, as it calls on the commissioners to check in the Dutch tombos for the true owners of the slaves in ques- tion. This, however, is a rare case when the petition in Tamil is also avail- able, which allows us to see that the English translation is more a summary than a word-for-word translation. What is interesting is the language used to describe the “slaves” in the original Tamil petition. The Tamil used by their master was “Parai Siraik Kudi” in Tamil, which means Paraiya and other Kudi (chattel) who are confined in a “Sirai” (prison) or com- pound. When compared with the English version, it is clear that addi- tional words were introduced in the translation: the English version refers to Nallua slaves, while the Tamil mentions Paraiya but not Nalluas. Why was this piece of information added? The language of “transfer” present in the Tamil version of ancestral siraik kudikal also conveys the uncontested notion of ownership of human bodies in a manner similar to material goods. Thus it appears that notions of ownership of human bodies as prop- erty that were present in Simons’s code had by the nineteenth century
been truly absorbed and naturalized by Jaffna Vellalars and had superseded earlier ties that existed between bonded laborer and landowner based on dependence and attachment.44
Much Ado About a Palanquin or Andol: Law and Justice
In Colonial Office documents preserved in the National Archives at Kew, a singular event that took place in 1819 is reported in the following man- ner. An individual named Cander Wayreven, described as “of the covia caste,” was apprehended by Cadirgamar Mylen Bellale (Vellalar) and the police vidane of Nallur for using a palanquin.45 The documents report the statement of Cander Wayreven, who alleged that he was sent by Mapana Mudaliyar with a palanquin—presumably carried by palanquin bearers—to Malluviel village for the purpose of bringing a sister-in-law of Mapana, but “finding himself unwell he was induced to get into the palanquin.” Even if the translation has muted their edge, these were defiant, insolent, perhaps willingly mischievous words of a young man who knew what would attend him. Cadirgamar refutes Wayreven’s claim, stating that “this covia had no appearance of being unwell that he started from his master’s house in the palanquin and had gone some distance in it before he stopped him.”46 This episode signals a disquiet affecting the very foundation of Jaffna society. A Coviyar, during Dutch rule, was forbidden from travel- ing in a palanquin. Wayreven’s act was a rebellion of a sort that spelled a complete rejection of the status quo. There were similar caste disputes over honors and ceremonial symbols such as umbrellas, horses, spears, and drums in early colonial port cities in Southeast India.47 The palanquin case was not a singular or uncommon event, as other incidents of contestation by caste groups described and categorized as slaves appear in the archive dur- ing the early decades of the nineteenth century. Jaffna society appears to be, then, the theater of generalized caste unrest created by the arrival of the British, a new colonial power in the land, and the often contradictory measures taken to address the hierarchical social system among the Tamils of Jaffna. Until the early nineteenth century what was perceived as custom “from times immemorial” had been sanctioned by the Dutch and encour- aged by the ruling Vellalar elites. In the case of the palanquin, British jurists in their newly conquered crown colony of Ceylon were faced with a
dilemma of a sort regarding the applicability of the code of former Dutch governor Cornelis Joan Simons to the inhabitants of Jaffna in the north of the island.
The magistrate’s court declared that Wayreven should be punished with eighteen lashes and further committed to hard labor for a period of four- teen days. W. H. Hooper, the same man we encountered in the previous chapter as collector of Galle, in the hope of proving the validity of his judg- ment and the acceptability of the punishment meted out to Wayreven, put forward the statement by a number of Vellalar mudaliyars written on ola leaf as evidence that it was the prerogative of Dutch officials in the eigh- teenth century to grant a license to mudaliyars of Vellalar caste to use palan- quins, and that the entire procedure was described in the license in great detail. The details included the type of palanquin, sometimes described as a “crooked palanquin,” the number of Coviyars who would carry the palanquin, which varied from six to twelve, the permission to use elephants, and the attendance of tom-tom beaters, kachcheri arachchis with peons, and flags.48
There was, however, much dissension within the administration of the colony. One argument by Lusignan, deputy to the governor, in favor of hard labor rather than flogging was based on clause 51 of Governor Simons’s code: “No native officers nor individuals shall be entitled to be carried in andols/palanquins through the country or the fort much less to take any coolies from the country for that purpose except those who are authorised by the successor of governors and Commodores on the pain of being out to hard labour for the period of six months and such persons as may procure coolies for the service of those unauthorized to employ them shall also incur the said punishment.”49 The commissioner of revenue, on the other hand, offered arguments in favor of the Jaffna collector’s decision to inflict flogging on the Coviyar slave as punishment. First he invoked “the custom that has in this respect notoriously prevailed in Ceylon” as suffi- cient to warrant the punishment inflicted. Second, he warned that the deci- sion of the Supreme Court that the use of a palanquin was common to everyone might lead to “breach of the peace” and be “productive of very serious disturbances.”50 Clearly, the British saw the maintenance of pre- sumed customs based on hierarchies as a safety valve against any potential antisocial act perpetrated by dominated people.
When confronted with these arguments, Chief Justice Harding Giffard and Judge Henry Byrnes responded with some degree of irritation,
finding flaws in two areas of the arguments made by the governor and his supporters. The first related to their doubt whether the cited regula- tion, Simons’s Code, was still in force in Jaffna, and the second related to the punishment of whipping that was pronounced by the collector of Jaffna and that was, in their view, “‘wholly unsupported even by the doc- ument now produced.”51 Indeed, the judges pointed out that the Regula- tion of 1706 mentioned a punishment of six months of hard labor rather than whipping. The Supreme Court was then composed of two officials who had some degree of independence vis-à-vis the governor since they were appointed directly by the Crown.52 They could take a dissenting position, as in the case of the palanquin under scrutiny.
There was no anxiety or change in sensibilities among members of the judiciary as far as whipping and flogging were concerned. Indeed, tattoo- ing, branding, and flogging of slaves, criminals, and prisoners were age-old practices in Europe aimed at stigmatizing and identifying marginalized groups and “criminal classes.”53 In British India and Burma, the name, crime, date, and court were branded on the forehead of certain classes of offenders to enable easier identification. British ideas about punishment were enmeshed with what was seen as local practices and spawned penal interventions that were in many ways unique to the Indian subcontinent.54 The case of Sri Lanka was somewhat different, as the British inherited
a land that had been colonized and disciplined by a Dutch Calvinist under- standing of crime and punishment. Significantly, the Ceylon governor’s proclamation of September 23, 1799, abolished torture and what was referred to as “barbarous modes of punishment,” such as breaking on the wheel and mutilation, which were commonly practiced under Dutch rule.55 Legal punishments were severe in Europe at the time, but by the end of the eighteenth century they were most often practiced after the coup de grace.56 The colonized and enslaved body was subject to a high level of tor- ture and pain much longer than for citizens in the metropole.57 John Rog- ers contends, however, that early British courts did not abandon the prac- tice of “branding, the pillory, banishment, and the confiscation of property” together with sanctions of fine, imprisonment, and whipping.58
A list of prisoners accused of selling free persons as slaves (fig. 3.3) pro- vides us with some insights into the type of punishment that was handed out for various infringements of the law. In the first case listed, two of the prisoners guilty of stealing a “Vellale boy” were sentenced to receiving 101 lashes and imprisonment for two years, and in the second case the
Image
Figure 3.3 List of prisoners accused of selling free persons as slaves (SLNA Lot 25.1/19 with permission of Sri Lanka National Archives)
prisoner, seemingly guilty of the same misdemeanor, got a very severe sentence: 100 lashes on two occasions, a fine of 500 rix dollars, and impris- onment for five years.59 Flogging slaves and prisoners was a common practice in British colonies as well as penal settlements such as the Moreton Bay Penal Settlement in Southeast Queensland, where it was not uncom- mon to sentence convicts to up to 200 or 300 lashes, but more common sentences averaged 45 lashes for offences such as disobedience or absconding from work.60
The process of colonizing the body was found “across a whole range of interlocking colonial discourses, sites and practices: from penology to anthropology, from the army to the plantation and the factory.”61 The out- come of the case was the quashing by the Supreme Court of the “illegal proceeding” of the collector who had ordered the flogging of a man trav- eling in a palanquin. The governor eventually had the last word when he passed Legislative Act 2 of 1821 that aimed at defining the meaning of the world andol—a type of litter similar to the palanquin but without a tent and with a straight pole—and at giving magistrates discretionary power to inflict corporal punishment, instead of a fine and imprisonment, on slaves who were convicted of misdemeanors, thus complying with the wishes of slaveholders, for whom imprisonment of their labor force was a huge
impediment.62 The legal wranglings, however, are of as much interest as the manner in which this episode illustrates the social tensions wreathing Jaffna in the early nineteenth century. The timing of Wayreven’s individ- ual revolt in 1819 was not accidental; it happened precisely at the moment abolition acts were being put into application in Jaffna and the edifice of slavery was beginning to erode.
Abolitions Acts and Compensation in Jaffna: Negotiating Registration
The early nineteenth-century context was an enabling one where even the least literate people were increasingly aware that the institution of slavery as it existed during Dutch rule was being dismantled by the abolition laws passed a year before the palanquin incident. This process of gradual aboli- tion of slavery started in the early nineteenth century when the British con- quered the provinces in Sri Lanka that were then under VOC rule, includ- ing Jaffna. Frederick North brought about a number of reforms in 1799–1800, the most important being that slaves who had belonged to the VOC were set free, and the import and export of slaves was forbidden. This was very early compared to other British colonies. For slaves who were not owned by the VOC, other measures were passed that included forbid- ding the purchase of slaves (children) during famine. Slaves could not be ill-treated by masters, and if they were they would be set free. These reg- ulations would have created a feeling among slaves that the end of slavery was near since the government had to issue a warning that “any act of dis- obedience against the ‘ just authority of their masters and mistresses’ or false and frivolous complaints against them would be punished severely.”63 The bedrock of the reforms that followed after 1806 under Governor Maitland was the creation of slave registers in all areas under British rule where slavery was still practiced. Regulation 13 of 1806, dated August 14, made it mandatory for slaveholders to register their slaves “classed under the denomination of Covias, Nalluas, and Pallas” within a period of four months on the penalty of forfeiting the title to those who were not regis- tered. After expiry of the period another regulation, Regulation 3 of 1808, suspended the penalty of forfeiture and extended the term for another six months.64 This was known as Maitland’s registry and was quite an inno- vation in the newly acquired crown colonies of the empire. While the
registries remain lost to historians, Supreme Court records refer to specific cases of emancipation of Nallua slaves that took place through litigation, as in the case between the “Sovereign Lord the King” as plaintiff and Super- maniam (Subramaniam) Seagen Chitty as defendant. The slaves Naatchy and eight others were declared free according to the Supreme Court decree of February 24, 1807. Freedom was bestowed so that “they and their descen- dants would enjoy the rights immunities and privileges of free born per- sons.” It was also declared that their names should be “expunged” from the tombos (a type of census that registered adult persons and their ser- vices due to the VOC, on which they had been entered as slaves).65 This regulation, like the previous one, was not complied with, as the penalty of forfeiture was never exacted. For the next ten years little progress was made. In the British Parliament, however, under the influence of William Wil- berforce and other abolitionists, there arose a call for the registration of all slaves in the West Indian colonies for the avowed purpose of preventing an illicit importation that violated the Abolition Act. Yet more covertly it emanated from a concern for improving the condition of the enslaved peo- ples. Colonial legislatures reluctantly passed acts instituting the registra- tion of slaves—first in Trinidad in 1812, conceived as a test case by aboli- tionists, and then in Jamaica, for instance, where there were six triennial registrations between 1817 and 1832. In Barbados, after quelling a slave rebellion, the Barbadian planters passed a Slave Registration Act in 1817.66 Other colonies, such as Mauritius and the Cape of Good Hope, followed suit in making registration part of colonial law. The laws enacted in Sri Lanka were significantly different from those in British plantation colo- nies as they dealt with a population that was not socially alienated, that belonged to the land they worked on, and whose status had been modified from bonded labor to slave during Dutch rule. The purpose of the new regulations in Sri Lanka went beyond those of establishing an official slave census and monitoring illegal smuggling.67
In 1818 two new regulations (nos. 9 and 10) were passed in Sri Lanka,
one effecting a complete registry of slaves in all areas of the maritime prov- inces and abolishing the joint tenure of slaves, this being particularly applicable to Coviyar, Nalavar, and Pallar castes in Jaffna. The other estab- lished the procedures to enable registration to be done in an effective manner. This entailed appointing commissioners in Jaffna, namely, the col- lector, provincial judge, sitting magistrate, and assistant collector of Jaffna, to oversee the registration process. The costs would be covered by the stamp
duty on the certificates of registration. Every detail was considered, includ- ing the amount and cost of stationery—“about 40 reams of royal and 30 reams of foolscap paper”—that would be needed for the various forms and certificates to be issued.68
According to Regulation 9 of 1818, the prince regent accepted the vol- untary emancipation of all children born of female slaves on and after August 12, 1816, whose proprietors had signed a declaration. This com- promise, which entailed freeing the children but releasing them from ser- vice only once they reached the age of fourteen, was hatched by Chief Jus- tice Sir Alexander Johnston, who encouraged slave proprietors who had been given the right to sit on juries to display their high moral values through a voluntary emancipation of the newborn children of their slaves. A phased process was always envisaged. “A sudden and total abolition of slavery,” according to the Dutch gentlemen members of the juries, would indeed subject “both the proprietors and the slaves themselves to material and serious injuries.”69
The impact of this regulation was immediate as slave proprietors were expected to register their female slaves and the children at the provincial court within three months of the regulations being issued. Furthermore, death or birth of a slave or child of a slave had to be registered by the pro- prietor within eight days of the event. Similarly, a newly acquired slave had to be registered. A number of forms were created for this purpose, and severe fines were stipulated for failure to register slaves. Under certain con- ditions, slaves who wished to be emancipated could appear before the provincial court of the district. The British kept a close watch on slaves in the same way as they did over other forms of property in their colonies as well as in Britain. Article 24 empowered the court to “by order in writing assemble five respectable persons, of whom two shall be chosen by the pro- prietor and two by the slave, and the last appointed by such court, and those five persons, or the major part of them, shall by a writing under their hands, recorded in court, fix a fair price to be paid by the slave to the pro- prietor, on payment of which . . . the said slave shall be free.”70
Very few holders of domestic slaves in the northern province had sub- scribed to the Address to His Royal Highness Regent for Emancipating Children born of slaves after August 12, 1816: in Mannar, eleven Dutch inhabitants and Burghers, seventeen Chitties, and one Moorman, while in Jaffna, only nineteen Dutch and Burghers. Jaffna Vellalar proprietors were reluctant to abandon the privilege of keeping humans under bondage and
saw no advantage in complying with British directives. There might have also been a certain degree of willful uncertainty among Jaffna proprietors about whether Nalavar, Pallar, and Coviyar slaves were included in the pro- vision.71 As far as domestic slaves in these areas were concerned, the slave- holders were exclusively Burghers and Europeans, as revealed from the names of the proprietors. The slaveholdings in 1818 varied, from one or two as in the case of Widow Tussaint or Gerret Frankena to twenty-two in the case of Widow Saalfelt.72
The colonial administration set about establishing an office in each dis- trict and nominating bureaucrats in charge of overseeing the application of the new procedures. According to Regulation 9 of 1818, a registry would be opened by the provincial court in each district in the maritime prov- inces, where proprietors of slaves were required to register the names, ages, and sex of the children of the female slaves in order to determine if the children were born before or after August 12, 1816. The time allowed for registration was three months from the date of the regulation. The colo- nial state would issue a stamp of six fanams73 for each certificate issued to the person registering, who would then have to pay this amount to the colonial state (article 10). Commissioners were expected to take a weekly tour of duty while sitting singly in weekly rotation at the kachcheri (cutch- erry) together with a secretary, a clerk, an interpreter, a Malabar writer, and two peons. As part of their duty, they would send a report on the first of every month with the lists of slaves from each district and other matters pending to be carried to the next monthly account.74
The entire process as envisaged by the colonial administration of Sri Lanka if it were applied to all districts of the maritime provinces could earn the following revenue for the government through the issue of stamp duties: 1,000 rix dollars for 2,000 domestic slaves at six fanam each, and 5,000 rix dollars for 20,000 Coviyar, Nalavar, and Pallar slaves at three fanam each.75
The 1818 regulation built on the notion of penalty to slaveholders that was introduced in Maitland’s registry of 1806. The antecedents of the idea of penalty can be traced as far back as Thomas Cromwell’s official injunc- tion of September 5, 1538, to every parish incumbent in England and Wales to make a written record in a book of all ceremonies—christenings, mar- riages, and births—conducted in a parish. Failure of an official to under- take such a recording was monetarily penalized. The idea of a potential
danger of tampering was visible in the injunction to keep all registers under lock.76 But there was a singular difference. In 1818 there was clearly a desire to school slaveholders in adopting better practices through an exercise of power that was “a mode of action upon the actions of others.”77 Going much further than the simple act of forfeiture present in the regulation of 1806, the 1818 regulation provided in great detail the list of fines for omit- ting to register, for omission or willful misstatement, and for omitting to give notice of the birth of a child. The fines ranged from twenty rix dol- lars for failing to give notice of the death of a slave to two hundred rix dollars for omitting to notify of a birth. Failure to pay would lead to imprisonment and hard labor for a term not to exceed twelve months (article 11). A schoolmaster or headman neglecting to certify or with- holding a certificate of registry from a proprietor would have to pay a fine of ten rix dollars (article 23). As such, the exercise of government was never simply an act of repression or of granting freedom, but fundamen- tally an act of intervention and production; there was an intrinsic effort to restructure, re-create and act upon the social reality by making it intel- ligible and thus malleable. Corporal punishment remained as traces of the old world, for crimes such as fraudulent erasure or false entries in the registers.78
The registers for the northern districts of the island were divided in
two sorts: those for domestic slaves and those for Nalavar, Pallar, and Coviyar slaves. The latter, compiled in the 1820s, dealt with Coviyar, Nalavar, and Pallar slaves from Jaffna, Mannar, Tenmoratchie, Patchela- palla, The Islands, Trincomalee, Waddemoratchie, Walligammo, and the Vanni.79
The process of registration and issue of certificates of freedom entailed the production of a number of precise forms (A–H) and fourteen differ- ent types of certificates under a colonial “regime of verification.”80 The issuance of these documents was instrumental in binding people to a certain version of social reality, thus creating “paper truths” through bureaucratic documents.81 For instance, form B was the “Return of Slaves Belonging to an Owner Who Was a Subscriber to the Address to His Royal Highness the Prince Regent, in Favour of Emancipating Children of Slaves.” It listed the date; slave’s name, sex, and age; how the slave was acquired (purchase, gift, bequest, or inheritance); name of children of female slaves; age and sex of children; and whether born on or after August 12, 1816. Form G included
the name and caste of deceased slave, name of proprietor, date of death, and parish of original registry. Certificate no. 1 was for registration of domes- tic male slaves, and no. 2 was for domestic female slaves.
The slave registers listed domestic slaves in alphabetic order for prov- ince, district, and parish covered by the regulation, and separately slaves of the Coviyar, Nalavar, and Pallar castes and domestic slaves in the North, thus differentiating between the situation in the southern maritime prov- inces, where slavery involved domestics, and in the North, where it varied considerably between domestic and other types of labor, such as work in the gardens and fields.82
Regulation of 1821 and Compensation
Another regulation was passed in 1821 for the emancipation of all female slave children by purchase at their birth. With this regulation, the concept of compensation was introduced in Sri Lanka more than a decade before the Slave Compensation Act was passed in the British Parliament in 1837. The question of compensating slaveholders was debated among UK aboli- tionists and not endorsed by all. Thomas Clarkson, for instance, protested that men and women would receive “compensation for abstaining from iniquity.”83 The issue was that a compensation regime upheld the legiti- macy of owning human beings, erasing possible readings of slavery as a mortal sin or a heinous crime. As Susan Thorne has argued regarding com- pensation under the 1837 act, “compensation, in short, contained abolition’s implications within the amoral economy of free market capitalism.”84
The regulation issued in 1821 is important and unique in many regards. It was designed as an “orderly bureaucratic process with published rules and regulations and governmental procedures” and further strengthened the instruments of governmentality put into place in 1818 with the slave registers, a decade before the Colebrooke-Cameron reforms. In light of the slavery reforms of the preceding decades, the reforms enacted in 1832 after the visit of the Eastern Commission of Inquiry seem less of a break in the nature of state-subject relations in colonial Ceylon than a stage in a longer continuum.85 In 1821 W. H. Hooper, the collector of Jaffna instru- mental in whipping a slave for traveling in a palanquin, was already convinced of the advantages of free labor: “we must rather imagine, that people born free and capable of acquiring, in common with their
Image
Figure 3.4 Slave certificate, Jaffna kachcheri, 1830 (SLNA Lot 10/41 with permission of Sri Lanka National Archives)
neighbours, property of all kinds, are much more likely to become an industrious and in every respect useful set of persons than when laboring under the same disabilities that the slaves of the present day do.”86
Regulation no. 8 of 1821 improved on the Regulation of 1818 by intro- ducing the principle of monetary compensation to the owner who will- ingly registered the child of a slave. The amount received from the collec- tor by the proprietor depended on the “present value of grown-up female slaves and the chances of life.” Thus if the mother was of Nalavar or Pallar caste, he would receive the sum of two rix dollars, and if the mother was of the Coviyar caste, the sum of three rix dollars. The rationale was that bodies had monetary worth according to their labor value. The fact that Coviyars were used as domestic slaves in the home might explain their higher value as compared to the Nalavar and Pallar slaves, who were employed outside as workers in the fields, tending cattle or collecting pro- duce from trees. A certificate of freedom would be issued and given to the mother and a duplicate sent to the officer holding the registry of slaves in the district. A unique and curious deviation from the norm of compensa- tion in place in British colonies resided in the payment of two rix dollars to the mother for every child who was registered as free. Governor Barnes estimated the full cost of paying compensation at no more than 11,000 rix dollars annually, a cost that would have to be covered with the approval of “His Majesty’s Ministers.”87
The passing of this act provided an opportunity for the colonial author- ities in Colombo to clarify issues regarding the work and life of slaves and to obtain information from the collector regarding this issue. Lusignan reminded that “the number of children born who die before the age of 14 is reckoned at six in ten” and wanted to find out if emancipated slave chil- dren would be supported by their masters. He was informed that there was a custom that the slaveholder provided five fanams and a piece of cloth six cubits in length at the time of the confinement. The collector and judges in Jaffna also revealed that slaves could belong to one master and work for another landowner for their own individual interest, thus obtaining a share of the produce (paddy, coconut, tobacco) or even of the land. One doubts, however, that “‘many of the slaves” were “very opulent,” even if “the demand for labour” was seen as “high in the region.”88
British records that chart the “success” of abolition procedures invari- ably convey quantitative rather than qualitative results of the various reg- ulations of 1806, 1818, and 1821. Lieutenant Colebrooke thus summed up their effects purely in terms of the number of persons who were emanci- pated. In 1829 the number of female children who were made free under the 1821 regulation was 2,211; the number of children who had been reg- istered as free by the signatories of the address to the prince regent in 1816 was 96. There were still 15,350 slaves in the district of Jaffna according to the population returns of 1824, and 1,000 domestic slaves mainly but not only belonging to Dutch inhabitants or their descendants.89 In 1829 the government had purchased under this regulation 2,211 children, while 501 slaves had purchased their own freedom under the Regulation of 1818 either by labor on public works or otherwise.90 The registration of enslaved peo- ple by their proprietors continued well into the 1830s, as testified by the continued presence of officials dedicated to registration of slaves: there was a “malabar writer” employed in the slave registry at the provincial court of Jaffna until 1833.91 Tables of sums paid to Coviyar, Nalavar, and Pallar mothers and to the proprietors show that these regulations were actually enacted on the ground. The lists of emancipated children born of slaves further indicates that a sum was indeed disbursed to the mother of each child. The archive has a near complete record of the amount of money dis- bursed to mothers, as well as to officers, including the salary of clerks and Malabar writers employed in the commissioner’s court and the house rent for holding sittings under Regulation 10 of 1818—a total of ten rix dollars for the month of December in the Jaffna kachcheri.92
Just as in other societies that had slaves, the contempt of slaveholders for registration laws was revealed through delays, fraud, and passive-aggressive attitudes. In Mauritius, the Order in Council of 1826 requiring a slave surname as well as first name in the census led to proprietors registering their slaves under absurd or demeaning names, such as Vache, Capricieuse, La Sourde, Salade, or Asperge.93 In Trinidad, where registration of slaves took place in 1812, owners had only a month to file slave returns and pay the registration fee. The stipulation that any slave found unregistered after that time would be freed led most owners to comply.94
In Jaffna, some slaveholders who failed to comply with the regulation ended up in jail. Weler Taanduwen, Vellalar of Carrewilly, wrote to the Commissioners of Enquiry in 1830 begging for his release from jail, claim- ing old age and that, having been absent from his village, he was unaware that his Coviyar slave, Maria, had three children who needed to be regis- tered. Upon his return to the village in 1825, as he recounts, “one Mapana mudaliyar made a complaint before the Sitting Magistrate” and the court fined him sixty rix dollars. Since he did not pay, he was sent to the jail of Point Pedro, where presumably he remained at the time of writing his peti- tion.95 Other slaveholders used the visit of the commissioners as an occa- sion to protest against what they described as the unfairness of the
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Figure 3.5 List of emancipated slaves under government regulation no. 8 of 1821 (SLNA Lot 6/974, February 3, 183, with permission of Sri Lanka National Archives)
Regulation of 1821.96 This regulation covered only slaveholders in the northern maritime province, but on occasion a proprietor in the western province would try to obtain compensation for loss of slaves by order of the Supreme Court. Renaldus Hendricks de Ortha, a resident of Colombo, complained that the three slaves he had bought thirty years before from a Dutchman, Lieutenant Fenenkamp, had left him. The slaves, however, made a complaint in court after the promulgation of the 1821 regulation, and the court ruled against the proprietor, dismissing his documents. Hence he petitioned to get justice for his loss of property: “the ‘slaves left the house,” he wrote sadly.97 But in Colombo there was no regime of compen- sation put in place. Other slaveholders in Jaffna sent in petitions in 1830 asking for restitution of money paid as a fine for not registering slaves in 1820 owing to ill health or young age and orphan status. One slaveholder claimed that a person who had only a share in the slave had received the entire value for registering.98
Slaveholders or other tricksters were also quick to make use of the situ- ation to extract money from the colonial state under the pretext of regis- tering slaves. The sitting magistrate at Point Pedro reported: “I have the honor to inform you that I have discovered that frauds have in instances been committed by persons obtaining payment for female children under the Regulation No. 8 of 1821 whose mother’s name was not inserted in any slave registry and consequently are free.” He called for measures to pre- vent future fraud—in particular for the kachcheri to issue a certificate to proprietors certifying that the mother was actually registered.99 Denounc- ing slaveholders who had failed to register the birth of children of their slaves within the stipulated eight days was also a way of earning money for zealous officers and sometimes a way of settling old scores. In the case of Savesiar Chinnatamby against Cadergamar Chieftain Bellale of Inoville, taken prisoner for a breach of clause 23 of the Regulation 9 of 1818, the motivation of Chinnatamby to appear for a Nallua of Inoville, Siduwy Nagy, was clearly not humanitarian. Clause 23 of the 1818 regulation stip- ulated that the fine of ten rix dollars that the proprietor would have to pay would be divided between the informant—that is, the person prosecuting— and “our Lord the King.”100 In her petition, Siduwy Nagy claimed that neither her ancestors nor herself were slaves to anybody, and that Caderga- mar, her employer, was wrongfully trying to sell her off. The sitting mag- istrate, George Speldewinde, eventually ruled in favor of allowing Siduwy Nagy to purchase her freedom but stated that she needed to work for her
master until such time as a certificate of slave registration was produced in court. The rest of the decisions regarding the freedom of the child born in 1829 were sent for further advice and remain unknown.101
The day-to-day difficulties of the registering process appeared in the let- ters of the commissioners and magistrates of Point Pedro, Kaits, Chav- aganerry, Mullaitivu, and Mannar and the provincial courts of Jaffna and Trincomalee, who complained that they lacked sufficient stationery to reg- ularly issue the lists of registered slaves as stipulated in Regulation 10 of 1818. They asked respectfully to be supplied with “three quires and six- teen sheets of foolscap and one ream and 14 quires of China paper.”102 The system that was put in place was quite draconian insofar as every three months a letter had to be sent from the commissioner to the deputy secre- tary to the governor with the number of slaves registered.103
The number of children of slaves emancipated as per Regulation 8 of 1821 was significantly lower in the 1830s than in the early 1820s. In Sep- tember 1833 a single Coviyar mother was paid 3 pounds sterling and the proprietor 4.6 pounds sterling.104 The accounts for October were only mar- ginally higher: two Coviyar mothers and four Pallar mothers were paid their due.105 The registration of slaves in the North gradually came to a halt. Yet figures in the Ceylon Almanac of 1838 still showed over 25,000 enslaved persons in the northern maritime province.106
Symbols and Power: The Ambivalence of Freedom
It often happened in battles around material culture—a palanquin, jewelry—the existing power structures were challenged by people at the bottom of the hierarchy. By acting in a certain way—traveling in a palan- quin or wearing gold jewelry in public at the feast at the Nallur temple— they claimed for themselves honors that had until then been denied to them. While the palanquin case was a fait accompli where the harm done to Wayreven could not be undone, in the decade that followed members of less privileged groups, cognizant of the reluctance of the local authorities to go against Vellalar privilege, overrode this hurdle and sought to gain direct redress from the governor in Colombo. A petition written in 1830 to the Commission of Enquiry relates the long process and eventual defeat of a group of Nalavars trying to obtain the right for their women to wear earrings. The signatories of the petition, whose names were written by a
petition writer since the petitioners were most probably illiterate and had little room for self-representation, were thus named: Poroijy Paulo, Wiry- asi Morgan, Poroijy Sawery, Poroijy Santiago, Welen Nagen, Siviame Welen, Canden Sinnesen, and Perrian Canden. Their names suggest that their ancestors were converts to Catholicism during the Portuguese rule of the peninsula but had clearly reverted back to Hinduism or practiced both in congruence since they attended the feast at Nallur temple.107
The petition begins with an acknowledgment of the caste hierarchies prevailing in Jaffna. Vellalars were recognized as a “higher cast of people” and their people, the Nalavars, as an “inferior cast” in a discursive strategy of praise and deference that resembles what Francis Cody, using Arjun Appadurai’s formulation, has in the Tamil Indian context identified as “coercive subordination.”108 But unlike the case described by Cody, where deference is performed in order to compel the receiver to bestow kindness and compassion, the petition of rights-bearing colonial subjects bypasses the Vellalar masters to reach out to the bureaucratic realm of the colonial state. The petitioners were using the formulaic and prosaic language demanded by the listening state. The issue revolved around “the females of the petitioners” wearing gold earrings and the anger this provoked among Vellalars, who, together with headmen, convinced the collector to order the women to remove them. According to the petitioners, the collector was unaware that the governor had allowed them the privilege to wear ear- rings and to “remit the fine imposed against them.” This last point referred to the joy tax imposed by Governor North on personal jewelry (“Joys and Jewels”) and promulgated on April 4, 1800. This tax had initially led peo- ple to rise against it, one of the three areas where disturbances took place in the early nineteenth century being Mannar.109 It seems, however, that the right to be taxed was for Nalavars a right worth claiming rather than fighting for, since making such a claim incorporated them into the circle of reasonable subjects. It also gave credence to the claim that the governor had granted them permission to wear jewelry. So paradoxically, being taxed even without representation in an oppressive colonial situation was a rit- ual of affirmation, a way for less privileged groups to assert their individ- ual freedom as subjects of the state through a direct relation with its rep- resentative outside the parameters of custom. While their acceptance of the social contract by paying the tax brought legitimacy to the colonial state, it also had the more socially threatening effect of leveling differences between locals, all subjected to the same regime of extraction.
The petitioners used “hatred,” a strong term, to qualify the sentiment expressed against them by both Vellalars and Chitties. They also alleged that because they refused to pay twenty-five rix dollars to the police vidane who was attempting to raise money to cover a fine that the magistrate had compelled him to pay, he too “became much displeased” with them. They asserted that they had paid, as they did every year, the expenses for attend- ing the “heathen temple of Kandaswamy,” and on the night of the seventh of the previous month, the first and second petitioners, their sisters (per- haps their wives?), and their children went to watch the feast, standing at a distance on the public road. The use of the term “heathen” by the peti- tion writer, translating his own biases vis-à-vis non-Christian religions into the text, shows that petitions were not written in a context-free, abstract language that characterizes the field of bureaucratic administration in an ideal rational Western model.110
Nallur is a town in the Jaffna district about three kilometers from the city of Jaffna. It was the historical capital of the old Jaffna kingdom. The temple where the events that led to violence against Nalavar people hap- pened, whose presiding god was Murugan, was not the ancient temple long destroyed but one constructed in 1734 by Don Ragunatha Mapana Mudali- yar, schroff in the Dutch kachcheri and whose descendants continued to serve as administrators of the temple. The owner of Wayreven, the slave in a palanquin, belonged to this family of temple officials.
According to their rendering of the event, the petitioners were beaten and assaulted by the brother-in-law of the temple superintendent. He was assisted by a crowd of people who tore off the jewels worn by the female members of the party. The police vidane discharged one of the persons who stole the jewels while promising to restore them to the petitioners. During the attack the petitioners were stoned. But witnesses belonging to the caste of the police vidane and the superintendent accused them of assault, not only the first two petitioners but also six others who were not even present. The petitioners, as they explained in the petition, were then brought and convicted before the Supreme Court, where their witnesses who could have proved their alibi were not examined. Finally, the petition appealed to the humane consideration of the commissioners, thus attempting to establish a community of affect through accepted codes of communication.111 The petitioners never pleaded as subordinates nor performed subordination. The entire petition was written to frame injustice performed against respectable and tax-paying colonial subjects, in the expectation of a just ruling.
Whether the petitioners obtained justice is unfortunately not known, but this episode lucidly illustrates the determination of the Nalavar people to brave the possible wrath of the police vidane by refusing his extractive demands and displaying their jewels in public, thus performing their right. It is interesting to note the continuing centrality of jewelry in the rituals of domination and subordination. Jewelry was also a way laboring women were able to represent their status and erase conditions of poverty and labor exploitation, as studio photographs of jewelry-clad Indo-Caribbean inden- tured women in the early twentieth-century Trinidad testify. A century earlier, before the advent of photography and commercial postcards, there were no records of the visual style of the jewels worn by the Nalavar women who stood in front of the Nallur temple.112 Silver or gold, bracelets or chains, jewelry carried the ideology of resistance or was conceived as a chal- lenge to the order of things. Until the 1950s, depressed castes in Jaffna, known collectively as Pachamars, were not allowed to wear jewelry.113
Was it because lower castes had a reputation for disorder and were per- ceived as unruly that the Dutch felt compelled to issue orders forbidding them to desert, carry weapons, or divest themselves of other imposed fea- tures? In 1806 the British, just as the Dutch, made hierarchies clear in an ordinance stating that “all persons of the lower castes shall show to all per- sons of the higher caste such marks of respect as they are by ancient cus- toms entitled to receive.”114 In 1830 a letter from a person called Caatty Chasin Cooronader Pulle suggests that the practice of people of lower caste contributing to a “poor fund” “whenever a person from the low caste wishes to obtain that honor (‘spreading white cloth at their wedding’)” was no longer followed. Usurpers “without permission began to take upon themselves all the honours without distinction.” Clearly, the aim of “keep- ing casts in peace” was not being fulfilled.115 A Jaffna assistant government agent’s report of the late nineteenth century pointed to the symbolic nature of wearing jewelry, riding in carriages, and using tom-toms for marriages and other social functions for Nalavar, Pallar, and Coviyar caste people who were getting wealthier and hence refusing to abide by old prohibitions that demarcated them from the Vellalars.116
Religious conversion and preaching by missionaries could also have
played a role. The imbrication of caste and slavery in Jaffna bears some resemblance to “caste slavery” in Kerala, where most Dalits, mainly Pulayas, Parayas, and Kuravas, were agrestic slaves engaged in agricultural produc- tion for upper-caste landlords and temples. More than in Jaffna, though,
oppressed castes in places like Travancore saw in conversion to Christian- ity in the mid-nineteenth century a way of reclaiming a place in the mod- ern polity and reformulating their self-image. The role of missionaries in introducing the concept of equality among enslaved peoples appeared to be less significant in Jaffna, where enslaved individuals dealt directly and in an unmediated fashion with state institutions.117 Furthermore some accounts of missionaries in Jaffna point to a more conservative stance by Christian preachers toward challenges to the given hierarchies. Father Rob- erts of the Wesleyan Methodist Church described his preaching in these terms: “Last Sunday morning I preached in Tamil at the village of Wash- ermen. I was surprised to see a Brahmin present and in the evening I preached in the village of silversmiths and the Brahmin was again present. The people began to laugh at him and asked him: ‘are you coming to be taught’ but as they saw that I disapproved of their speech they desisted.”118
Other rare sources from the 1820s describe domestic slavery in Jaffna. One of them points to a relationship between a slaveholder and an enslaved woman who worked as a domestic in a Jaffna household that is less based on fear than on a seemingly unswerving loyalty of slave to master. Her life under the patriarchal authority of a Vellalar proprietor resembled in many ways that of a domestic slave such as Selestina in the southern maritime province or of enslaved domestics in Indian port cities under East India Company rule.119 This Coviyar slave appeared in the background in a crim- inal case in Jaffna involving the death of a Vellalar woman and her child in 1821.120 Mother and child were found dead, drowned in a well close to the compound of the house. The testimony of the “maid servant” Cadery Wayrewy lucidly explains the circumstances of her missing her mistress and the infant in the morning and hence going to wake up her master. Cad- ery lived in the home and had been working there for the past six years. She had access to the bedrooms of her master and mistress. One senses some familiarity between the servant and the couple. She painted a rosy picture of the relationship between husband and wife, asserting that the husband, Poodetomby, never beat his wife or quarreled and that there was no strife between them the night before the death occurred. Her story differed com- pletely from that of other witnesses. What kind of intimacy or ties of dependence existed between master and slave to warrant such loyalty? A Pallar slave also belonging to the household was sent to call the brother of the dead woman upon discovery of the drowned bodies. The brother’s tes- timony suggested a history of domestic violence and that his sister wanted
to leave her husband. Other witnesses, two travelers from Point Pedro stay- ing overnight in the house, corroborated that the husband had abused his wife that night, calling her names and beating her. After that there had been a silence, and then sounds of people whispering while doors were shut and opened. It soon became clear that the child and mother were tied together in a cloth before drowning and that the husband was having a relationship with another woman. The case was referred to the Supreme Court by A. G. Speldewinde, and the prisoner, despite the testimony of his loyal slave, remanded to jail until further notice.
From an archive of fragments, the historian is left with an ambivalent picture of caste relations in Jaffna in the early nineteenth century, at a moment when slavery was gradually being dismantled. While there are cases that show that the refusal to accept an unjust social system gained momentum, others point to compliance. Later developments, however, may offer some insight. Writing in the 1950s, Michael Banks commented on the rebellious nature of the Pallar, who were believed to be fallen Vel- lalars who had suffered a loss of status due to landlessness and poverty imposed on them. “Pallas,” he wrote, “always shout, even standing beside the person they are speaking to; they make no effort to look humble or smile ingratiatingly.”121
Running Away
Unlike the rich literature on runaway slaves in places like Cape Colony, little is known of the scale of runaways from Jaffna besides an occasional mention in records pertaining to other matters. Judicial records from the 1800 onward seldom refer to runaways. There is reason to believe, how- ever, that this phenomenon that was present and reported during the Dutch occupation of the land would have continued until the formal abolition of slavery in 1844. For enslaved people from Jaffna who occasionally ran away from the oppressive lives they were caught in—in acts of defiance against the repressive labor apparatus they had been born into—the Vanni was the obvious destination.122 Nigel Worden has referred to a “slave geography” to qualify the areas that in the slave worldview were the ideal spaces of refuge and meeting. While in Cape Town it was Table Mountain, for the Jaffna runaway the thick forests of the Vanni and beyond them the Kan- dyan kingdom provided the most inviting option.123 They belonged to this
wider family of deserters insofar as they were permanently absconding from work and breaching an unwritten agreement between them and their mas- ter. In the past, running away from Jaffna was punished severely by Dutch law, as various plakaats relating to runaways clearly state. The case of the runaway Wany Minjen illustrates the experience of many others whose lives were not recorded.
In 1812 in the court of Jaffnapatnam, a prisoner named Wany Minjen was tried in the High Court of Justice in a murder case dating from 1804. The account that comes to us through the report of the judge on court cases tried in Jaffna in 1812 illustrates the typical feature of the prose of counterinsurgency: that is a primary discourse of officials who either belong to the colonial apparatus or are affiliated with it. The account of the case has a quality of immediacy and involves direct participants. Statements that Ranajit Guha describes as “from the other side,” in this instance of the accused insurgent, appear only as “enclosures” to the larger truth claim.124 The picture one gets is hence from a “distorting mirror” through which one can only seldom read subordinate intentions through the veil of offi- cial rhetoric.
Minjen was apprehended by Mr. Turnour in Mullaitivu in 1809 and acquitted but brought back before the court owing to certain circumstances that the chief justice deemed important. In his initial trial it was stated that he was born in Jaffna, was a Nalavar slave, and that “in the year 1803 or 1804 he joined a man well known by the name of ‘Pandara Wannian.’” Pandara Wannian was described at the trial as “a coast man” who “came over to this country as early as 1783 as Pandaram or travelling mendicant” and who then settled in the Vanni. The character of Pandara was vilified in the account of the court, as a man who assumed a rank he was not enti- tled to by being carried in a palanquin, as well as ordering and judging people. Popular history remembers him, however, as he is described in J.
P. Lewis’s Manual of the Vanni Districts (1895), as “one of the dispossessed Vanni chiefs” from the northern part of the Vanni who married into a prominent southern Vanni family, the Nuwara Wewa clan. His battle against the British was fought using conventional warfare and guerilla tac- tics in Mannar and Trincomalee, and he earned himself the support of the Kandyan kingdom. He was successful in seizing the fort of Mullaitivu and driving the British out of the area, capturing their cannons, and spreading his power up to the Jaffna peninsula. Pandara’s troops, however, were taken by surprise a few months later, and after a battle where many died and
forty-three of his men were taken prisoner, the power of the Vanni chiefs was effectively destroyed. Although Pandara’s death is commemorated as having happened in a battle with Lieutenant von Drieberg on October 31, 1803, when the British launched a three-pronged attack from Jaffna, Man- nar, and Trincomalee, Lewis gives clear evidence from the account of Turnour that Pandara, after a period of seven years during which no overt acts were committed, began raiding villages again in May and Novem- ber 1810. Lewis was probably unaware of the earlier raid of 1804 where Minjen too was involved, which led to the death of an inhabitant but where Pandara was clearly described as well and sound. In May 1810 Pan- dara was reported to have attacked a village a mile away from Vavuniya and a Sinhalese Tavalam (resting place) with a party consisting of “fourteen men, and their arms of one sword, four creeses, two large knives and bludgeons.”125
The temporal referents of the report on the case are ambiguous and the descriptions loaded with animosity. Pandara, it states, was driven out of the Vanni by Turnour in 1790 and sent to Mullaitivu, from where he escaped and then took refuge in the area between the Kandyan kingdom and the British territories. The British rendering of Pandara is that of a hated man who, together with his gang of “persons of the worst descrip- tion,” began from 1803 to make “irruptions in the British Wanny.” The military battles are not recounted but rather acts of violence and maraud- ing committed against inhabitants. His gang allegedly attacked a village for the purpose of stealing the women but was repulsed: the description states that five Malays of his party were killed and three villagers died “defending their women.” Pandara’s insurgency against the British was unequivocally equated to acts of pure violence for loot and personal gain rather than motivated by any kind of anticolonial stirrings.
The account of the character and acts committed by Minjen, the Nala- var runaway slave, and his companions in 1804 comes to us through the voice of a witness from the Vanni who had been sent by Malay soldiers in the British army to a village to collect fowl and other goods. The witness recounts that he was caught in the midst of an attack. The warning came to the village that “the caffree (a deserter from Admiral Suffren’s fleet) Wayreven and Minjen were coming.” This led all the villagers and their families to flee into the woods. But one man (the deceased in the court case) was caught and brought back severely wounded by a sword, and the witness was caught “by the caffree and others and . . . marched on about
200 yards.” There, by order of Wayreven, “the deceased’s head was struck off.” The witness then described the behavior of Minjen: “armed with a pike and calling out to cut and kill,” thus contradicting Minjen’s allega- tion that he had been compelled by his two companions to take part in the killing. The witness was then taken in front of the Pandara Wannian, “who threatened to cut off his nose and ears and send him in that state to the Gentlemen for having endeavoured to procure supplies for the Malays,” but his life was spared and he was miraculously able to escape from con- finement. Minjen, appearing in court, alleged that he was ordered by the Pandara to “join his Pallas,” that the killing was done on Wayreven’s orders, and that “he had no hand in and could not prevent it.”
When the puisne justice summed up the evidence for the jury, he strongly argued to convict the prisoner for murder, saying that there was little evidence that Minjen was acting as a person in the service of another government such as the Kandyan kingdom but that everything pointed toward him being “a private person committing lawless depredations and cruelties upon defenseless people.” The only issue that needed to be dis- cussed was whether he was there by his own consent, as suggested by the witness, or by fear for his own life, as he tried to argue. The jury gave a verdict that went contrary to the wishes of the judge, who thought “he ought to have been convicted,” but he decided not to impeach their deci- sion as the jury system had just been introduced in the country. The judge recommended, however, that owing to the nature of the crime committed, Minjen “was a partaker”and was a “fit subject both morally and politically” for “removal to another country.”126 The life of the Nala- var runaway slave years after the case is not known, but one can surmise that he was deported to India as a measure of security and ended his exis- tence there.
In this chapter enslaved people in Jaffna expressed their discontent with social hierarchies through a variety of transgressions. This was a period of increasing colonial governmentalization of society when everyday inter- action between people and the state was expressed through processes of registration, legal codification, and petitioning, as well as individual revolt and rebellion. The fragmented bureaucratic legacy of these interactions reveals the complicity of certain colonial officials with the local dominant groups over slaves and others vested in “age-old” customs. Cander Wayreven publicly challenged the repressive customs that had been upheld
Image
Figure 3.6 Slave register, parish of Nallore, 1818–1832 (NA UK CO T71/664, with permission of National Archives, UK)
by the Dutch and Vellalar elite for so long, only to find out that the British officials were reluctant to take a stand that might lead to disorder.
A similar phenomenon occurred in India under East Indian Company rule, where slavery was perceived as an indigenous, religiously sanctioned institution that was so closely entwined with Indian sociability and domes- ticity that it was considered beyond the reach of British reformers. The difference between the Jaffna and the Indian cases is that the early Dutch framing of the Nalavars, Coviyars, and Pallars as slaves in the legal sense allowed for their later registration and inclusion in an abolition process and compensation regime.127
This chapter shows that small spaces for personal maneuvering and resis- tance were opening in unusual ways. Poroijy Paulo, Wiryasi Morgan, Poroijy Sawery, Poroijy Santiago, Welen Nagen, Siviame Welen, Canden Sinnesen, and Perrian Canden petitioned for the right of their wives to wear jewelry, a right they claimed on the basis that they had paid taxes on them. Minjen chose to flee to the Vanni.
In individual cases, bureaucratization provided grounds for negotiation and resistance and the potential to take control over their individual lives. Publicly, however, registration practices confirmed the presence of slavery and hierarchy in society, and it was on such premises that the assaulters of the Nalavar women wearing jewelry to the temple acted and where free- dom was publicly denied. What happened to Wayreven, the slave who rode in his master’s palanquin, is difficult to fathom. All we have about him is his name in the slave register of the parish of Nallore (fig. 3.6) and a date of registration, 1822. His master remained Mapana Mudaliyar, and he was registered as a Coviyar slave.128
CHAPTER IV
The Chilaw “Experiment”
Labor for Freedom
T
he Chilaw experiment in slave emancipation that began in 1820 has gone unnoticed by historians of slavery and historians of Sri Lanka alike. This is not surprising since, as an event, it did not
shatter the economy of the colony nor provoke any incidents of violence or social unrest. Yet it deserves to be inscribed on the wall of history for the part it played in the long journey of people who, through bold acts and practices, reclaimed the right to be treated as humans. It is in a sense a pre- lude to better-known experiments in freeing labor in the British crown colonies of Mauritius and Trinidad.1 It displays some uncanny and striking resemblances to later labor systems of the nineteenth century commonly defined as indentured and contractual and/or free wage-based labor. This singular episode contributes to shoring up the nineteenth-century reality of labor in Sri Lanka as an uneven and irregular temporal sequencing of a variety of modes of labor organization.
The Chilaw experiment applied a seemingly simple equivalence: eman- cipation of enslaved people in exchange for their labor in public works. According to this scheme, which ran for over ten years, hundreds of Covi- yar, Nalavar, and Pallar slaves from Jaffna whose freedom was purchased by the colonial government from their proprietors were sent over three hundred kilometers away to Chilaw in the southwestern part of the island in the early decades of British rule to perform hard labor on canals and other public works.
[ 126 ]
Jaffna
N
30 km
Mannar
Kalpitiya
Puttalam
Chilaw
Negombo
Colombo
Figure 4.1 West coast of Sri Lanka
The impetus for the enslaved to work in such hostile conditions may have been the hope that their status in Jaffna’s hierarchical society would change. Upon their return, they were told, they would become free sub- jects. This freedom, they were not told, was conceived purely in a legal sense since it would not shield them from other forms of economic duress based on landlessness and lack of capital. Later developments show that emancipated slaves became free only insofar as the constraints limiting their choice of employment were economic factors rather than coercion on mobility enforced by the state or the social environment.2 The colonial decision to introduce this scheme of freedom for labor was motivated by the labor exigencies of the day rather than by the moral and legal reformist
aims that underpinned the antislavery movement in Britain.3 While the idea that some aspects of slavery were inhuman or un-Christian was pres- ent among a few judges, most notably Justice Alexander Johnston, in the early decades of the nineteenth century, it was not until the arrival of the Colebrooke-Cameron Commission in 1829 that evidence of the ills of slav- ery was systemically sought out.
Traces of the lives of enslaved people loom in the bundles of correspon- dence between the zealous collector of Jaffna, the main protagonist, and his counterpart in the Chilaw kachcheri. These missives often take the form of a litany around a constant need for more slaves, for more or better qual- ity rice to feed them, and of cold statistics listing their deaths, flights, or sojourns in the hospital. While the archive yields some details about the men—there is no mention of women—who labored under painful condi- tions, there is no public memory of their lives. Their elision from modern historiography is total. They do not exist even as “facts” or representations. For this reason this chapter reads differently from the others in this book. The individual stories are tiny fragments of lives that come to us as lives of labor rather than of men or women in society.
The district of Chilaw, a coastal area between the predominantly Tamil-speaking North and Sinhalese-speaking South, was described in the Universal Geography as “a comfortable village, lying between two branches of a large river. Pearl fishery was occasionally carried on here. It was a frontier area where ‘the inhabitants begin to consist of Singalese instead of Malabars.’ ”4 A few years later, Simon Casie Chetty mentioned that the opening of the new canal between Chilaw and Colombo had “proved very beneficial to the inhabitants of Calpentyn (Kalpitiya) and the trade by inland navigation is rapidly advancing,” and that the inhabitants of Calpentyn were “composed of Malabars, Burghers, Java- nese and Moors.”5
Sri Lanka’s system of waterways dates back to the fifteenth-century reign of the king of Kotte, Parakrama Bahu VIII, when it was necessary to trans- port goods such as cinnamon and other spices from the interior to the bustling seaport of Negombo, where ships were anchored before sailing to China, Burma, Rome, and Greece. The Dutch had built on the older waterways and had joined several of the lagoons in the South by canals, forming an inland navigation from Puttalam to Negombo that is still nav- igable for small vessels. In the decades that followed, the British colonial state would engage in the work of clearing many of the canals that had
been filled by sand and restoring the capacity for inland water communi- cation that extended more than 150 miles from Kalutara to Kalpitiya. The British colonial state’s concern for canals was apparent in early legislation passed to encourage people to look after the infrastructure. For instance, according to Regulation 9 of 1821 for preventing obstruction of naviga- tion from the Grand Pass to Colombo Harbor: “Any person who is con- victed of throwing any dirt, rubbish or dead animals into either of the said canals shall be liable to pay a fine not exceeding fifty rix dollars and to be imprisoned till such fine be paid.”6
The migration of hundreds of emancipated slaves from Jaffna who lived, worked, and died in Chilaw is an absent event that has a disturbing side to it. It seems to conform to a logic that freedom was a privilege that only able-bodied men capable of hard manual work could aspire to, rather than a right shared by all. The equivalence of work and freedom as it was con- ceived by the colonial mind was reminiscent in some ways of an older notion of freedom as a status that only some deserving bodies would be bequeathed with. What were the moral and political assumptions that underpinned the design and implementation of a scheme that quantified freedom in terms of work hours and aptitude for labor? What, then, was the monetary value of being a free man? Of course slavery had naturalized the idea that enslaved human bodies were commodities. This notion, cou- pled with the spread of a free labor ideology, of which Adam Smith, in his An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776), was the most distinguished exponent, made the Chilaw experiment possible to conceive.
Since the mid-eighteenth century many British colonial thinkers believed in the rationality of a social scientific exercise that aimed at assess- ing whether free wage labor was comparable or superior to slave labor. In Chilaw, however, there was little to compare with the “mighty experi- ment” of West Indian emancipation that British policy makers conceived as a quasi-scientific experiment that, if successful, might be replicated all over the world. There the fundamental question that was put to test was whether, and under what conditions, freed people would work for wages, quite unlike the issue in Chilaw, which was borne out of a pressing need for a labor force of any sort—coolie, convict, or emancipated slaves put on a fast road to freedom.7
The Chilaw experiment also begs some questions about the reasons that led Coviyar, Nalavar, and Pallar people to leave their homes in Jaffna for
an uncertain life of labor in a relatively distant district. Can we ever know how voluntary this choice was, and under what conditions it was made? Was the idea of freedom or justice so powerful that desire for it could empower men to act in unexpected ways, or was their life so unbearable that they signed on a blank sheet, making a decision that was devoid of self-reflection?8
More broadly, this forgotten episode of labor migration also has the power of unsettling some of our assumptions about the pairing of the pre- modern and the modern and constructed temporal divides. The accepted narrative of the coming of modernity in Sri Lanka is that it unfolded as a natural consequence of the Colebrooke-Cameron reforms of 1833. These reforms, hailed as a key moment in Sri Lanka’s trajectory, are believed to have put a sudden end to what David Scott describes as the Old British Colonial System of Empire that was dependent on “the application of a mute physical force” on the bodies of dominated people. The ensuing New Colonial System of Empire supposedly brought in “techniques of subjec- tification, surveillance and discipline.”9 This neat pattern of social change based on an old replaced by a new reflects an unlikely Manichean situa- tion rather than what seems to resemble much more a messy past of colo- nial experiments and roads half taken. There is much evidence that the Colebrooke-Cameron reforms were not, as mentioned before, such a cru- cial pivot. The Chilaw episode brings to light transitions, periods that com- plicate and mediate bondage and freedom taken in their most prosaic sense and indicate the need to examine the longer historical duration and to question a putative freedom to unfreedom continuum. We know little of the way postemancipation actors and subjects thought of coerced and free wage labor in an island that was on its way to transforming into a labor- intensive, export-oriented plantation colony. Were the emancipated slaves conscious that the freedom they gained, as Marx argued, was nothing more than a freedom to work and choose between a set of ever more oppressive employers?10
This chapter will show through a bricolage of the lives of labor of these emancipated slaves in Chilaw that modernity and liberal thought were ever present in the procedures informing a gradual abolition of slavery, decades before the Colebrooke-Cameron reforms. Much earlier than is generally conceived, colonial administrators as children of the Enlightenment relied on a concept of universal reason, albeit inflected by racial considerations,
to devise practical responses to issues of insufficient labor for public works and the inadequate revenue generated by the new crown colony. It was precisely these liberal free market concepts that were employed to extract labor from the Coviyar, Nalavar, and Pallar slaves of Jaffna in exchange for their own freedom or that of their kin. Liberalism was clearly not purely the pursuit of an extension of individual rights.
Beyond a few petitions written by enslaved men calling for a change in their contract, their voices are absent. The historian is left with a discur- sively reflexive task of translation that involves filtering the occasional moments of the lives of emancipated slaves hidden in letters and reports penned by colonial administrators and reading against their representation.
Leaving Jaffna
By 1820 the colonial government was concerned that it was in dire need of labor to work on the opening of a canal in Chilaw and informed the Jaffna collector that labor from Jaffna was to be tapped and encouraged to serve the state. The first reference to this measure came in a letter dated June 6, 1820, in which the Chief Secretary’s Office gave permission for “the slaves who may be emancipated at the cost of government” to be given a seer11 per day in addition to their ration of rice from the moment of their depar- ture from Jaffna.12
The precise reason for opening up the canal in Chilaw does not appear explicitly in the correspondence between collectors and Colombo officials. It was perhaps too obvious to even mention that the function of the canal was to create a mode of facilitating the flow of goods to and from Chilaw and Colombo, transporting in “ballams” to the Colombo market “cop- perah (coprah), salt fish, fish roes, dried shrimps, ghee, deers horn, in return for the Chinaware, English cloth, sugar, dates, jackwood planks, tiles, bricks, iron, lead.”13 Yet this episode in infrastructure building for trade was also aimed at bringing about improvement to the region in order to prove British advantage over their Dutch predecessors, renowned for build- ing canals and other waterways. The Dutch had constructed a canal system that connected Negombo, Chilaw, and Puttalam lagoons, thus provid- ing transport by water from Colombo to Kalpitiya. For the British, a rela- tively new colonial power in the island, work on canals and roads was
endowed with a value beyond the purely economic. As environmental transformative technologies, canals and roads served political and ideologi- cal imperatives too, that of representing for colonial subjects the efficiency of the new colonial power, its ability to enlist a docile army of coolies and emancipated slaves, and their mastery of the scientific tools to transform a hostile natural environment into a triumph of what would later be called “colonial science.”14 Infrastructure development was a way of appropriat- ing and claiming ownership of the land and stabilizing authority and power over the people. By intervening in transport and trade, the colonial state could enter and intervene in the intimate domain of everyday life, linking its project with the lives of the local people.
More directions regarding the procedures to be put in place were sent by the Colombo authorities to the collector of Jaffna in September 1820. Recruiting labor from Jaffna meant taking away men from their existing work and occupation. A monetary compensation was offered to slave pro- prietors to remedy the loss of labor that would inevitably affect their pro- duction units, but there was a sharp concern on the part of British officials about the reaction of the headmen toward their bonded labor earning their freedom and moving away. Less slave labor signified not only a loss in terms of manpower but also a loss of prestige and status for proprietors. British officials were aware of the mounting opposition. In a letter to the sitting magistrate of Point Pedro, the collector of Jaffna mentioned that “all oth- ers interested in retaining them [the slaves] in bondage will no doubt thwart the intention of government.” The method of recruitment was uncompli- cated. Unlike later forms of labor recruitment that involved, in various colonial settings, intermediaries known as sirdars in eastern India or maist- ries and kanganis in southern India, in this situation, where migration was internal and organized by the state, it was the magistrate who initially played the role of recruiter.15 The magistrate’s task as defined by the col- lector of Jaffna was to assemble the Nalavars and Pallars of his magistracy at different times for each caste and “earnestly explain to them that the mea- sures now proposed are most positively to their advantage.” He was also asked to appeal to their sense of duty by stressing that “their services were needed.” The enslaved were not given much information about their future destination except that they would work on the canal that was being made between Negombo and Chilaw.16 It is difficult to know if they had a sense of distance and if they had ever left their district of birth. The call for labor was issued and made public in the same way as other
state regulations. The court was the public arena where people were assembled to hear about the rules, needs, and wants of a remote state nested in Colombo. In a similar fashion, a year later the magistrate of Jaffna was reminded to make “the contents of the same [Regulation 8 of 1821] as generally known as possible through the country by causing the same to be read in Tamil every Saturday in his court.”17 Three hundred copies in Tamil of Regulation 8 were sent to Jaffna to be distributed among the people.18 The literacy of the population in Tamil would have been quite high owing to the early efforts of Dutch missions among slave chil- dren in particular. In 1786 the total number of schoolchildren in the northern province was 35,963, of which 2,180 were slave children.19 Even if these figures are only estimates, they suggest that literacy in Tamil was fairly well spread among the people and that educated enslaved children in 1785 would have been adults in the 1820s. In 1816 the first American mis- sionary school in Tellipai had already opened its doors, paving the way for a long-standing involvement of American missionaries in Jaffna.
It is difficult to know if the initial system of recruitment was later replaced
by a more informal one where returnees or runaways from Chilaw would play a role in providing positive or negative information on the labor con- ditions there. The difficulty in persuading people to move to Chilaw sug- gests that rumors that generally flourish at times of tension and change would have reached people in Jaffna regarding the sickness and mortality that accompanied the journey to Chilaw and the concomitant dream of acquiring freedom. There is, however, no trail for the historian to follow, no “documentary debris for historians to sift through,” as rumors con- structed in the vernacular of the people have not been recorded for posterity.20
For slaveholders, letting go of their slaves would have meant a consid- erable loss. The labor for Chilaw was recruited among Coviyar, Nalavar, and Pallar slaves but mainly from the two last caste groups, which had been involved in tobacco cultivation since the Dutch period and can be identi- fied with agricultural labor castes from the Coromandel Coast, referred to as “coast slaves” in Dutch reports of the period. In the late seventeenth cen- tury, 3,589 such slaves were brought from Coromandel (today’s Tamil Nadu) by private individuals to be employed in Jaffna as domestics and as agricultural labor.21
Tobacco cultivation was described by Emerson Tennent as “the grand staple of the district, and that on which the prosperity of its agriculture is
chiefly dependent.”22 It was grown on what was called “garden lands” and on paddy lands after the harvesting.23 As Tennent explained, the soil is pre- pared and manured to an extent that, after that, two or even three crops can be grown on the land. Tobacco cultivation “causes new land to be bro- ken up for its growth,” thus leading to an improvement of all inferior land.24 Writing two decades later, in 1830, Casie Chetty mentioned the tobacco of “very superior quality raised in large quantities, particularly in the district of Pachellepalli,” one of the four districts exclusive of the islands, the three others being Wadamarachy, Tenmarachy, and Waligamme.25
Cash crops such as tobacco had been introduced in Jaffna by the seven- teenth century but were more widely cultivated in the eighteenth century as an article of export to the kingdom of Travancore. Merchants from Tra- vancore provided credit to farmers in Jaffna to purchase the forthcoming crop, and middlemen often bought the leaves and sold them to Malayalee traders at a profit.26 Tobacco spread to new areas in the Jaffna peninsula, such as Wadamarachy and East Valikaman villages, as well as Mannar and the Vanni. In 1783 more than a million pounds of tobacco leaves were exported from Jaffna. The Dutch imposed an export duty of 20 percent.
Sinappah Arasaratnam alleges that tobacco plantations “benefitted a wide segment of the community,” a qualification that stands to be tested.27 Tobacco cultivation was indeed one of the most labor-intensive crops: it involved preparing the land, planting the seeds, watering, weeding, laying fertilizer (animal manure), harvesting, stringing and hanging the leaves for curing, and carrying the harvested leaves from the farms to the curing. While figures for Jaffna are not available, it is useful to compare the labor rendement in Virginia during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, where each slave or indentured servant working on a tobacco plantation may have planted and weeded about two acres of cleared land with nine thousand to ten thousand plants a year. In 1901, according to Tennent, more than fifteen thousand acres of Jaffna were under tobacco, which would explain why seventy years before, there were, according to slave registers, over seven thousand slaves in the Jaffna population.28 However, the fig- ures for Nalavars and Pallars, who generally worked in cultivation, bring the number of slaves potentially working on tobacco farms to approxi- mately four thousand (fig. 4.2).
The figure of fifteen thousand acres may be excessive, as a sessional paper of 1912 on tobacco cultivation estimates the area under cultivation at seven thousand acres.29 The same paper gives an estimate for the early twentieth
4,000
3,000
Number of slaves
2,000
1,000
0 Covia Nallua Caste
Palla
Figure 4.2 Number of slaves per caste (author’s data from NA UK CO T71/664)
century of the costs of production of an acre of tobacco and includes some details of the labor force involved:
40 coolies for hoeing
40 coolies for burying the leaves and arranging and transplanting 2 men for watering for 60 days
40 coolies for hoeing
1 man for topping for 16 days30
Apart from tobacco and rice, palmyra palms were ubiquitous around the villages and provided an important resource in the northern parts of the peninsula. The fruit, leaves, toddy, and timber were an integral part of the lives of the people in Jaffna. Enslaved people also worked in palmyra gardens, drawing toddy from January to August and digging palmyra roots. A criminal case in Jaffna where a Nalavar caste man, Mody Winsy, stabbed to death his fellow worker, Pody Podien, for allegedly mixing water with his toddy, gives a rare insight into the life of Nalavars who are seen in the account, drawing toddy with two knives, rooting out palmyra side by side, and occasionally getting into murderous disputes that lead to convic- tion and hanging.31
The Nalavars were deeply connected to the land they worked on and tied to their proprietors through a bundle of rights. Thus freeing enslaved labor engaged in working in tobacco, palmyra, and other forms of cultiva- tion for the Chilaw scheme could be done only at considerable cost to proprietors.
Terms of Employment
Unlike laborers utilized for public works, working under rajakariya or con- victs, the Chilaw workers were issued a written contract, which they signed. This piece of paper created a bond between employer and employee based on written conditions rather than on custom as in rajakariya or even state disciplinary practice such as convict labor. The rajakariya system, which combined land tenure and caste service, underwent many changes during the precolonial and successive colonial domination of the maritime provinces; the British inherited a “metamorphosed system in 1796.”32
Rajakariya involved the performance of two kinds of duties: the first related to services based on caste with respect to lands, and the second, to unpaid services rendered by people for the repair and maintenance of the roads and bridges of their district. The British appropriated this traditional form of labor extraction specifically for public works, quite unlike the Por- tuguese and Dutch, who had used it to their benefit without altering its character. The form of military government that prevailed in the first two decades of British rule permitted the governor to serve direct orders relat- ing to the making of roads or canals and issue military orders to requisite labor. There had been attempts to abolish rajakariya during British rule: first during the short period of East India Company rule (1796–1802), when freeing labor and abolishing the service tenure failed to receive the sup- port of the people. It was reintroduced after an upheaval and once again abolished by Governor North, who replaced it with an obligation to serve on public works against payment. Governor Maitland (1805–1811) was extremely critical of this procedure as the “lazy native” could not be com- pelled to work, nor was he interested in monetary compensation, “for there being no penalty, there is not an inhabitant in this island that would not sit down and starve out the year under the shade of two or three Cocoa Nut trees, the whole of his property and the whole of his subsistence, rather than increase his income and his comforts by his manual labour.”33
Maitland reintroduced the right of the state to extract service on the basis of caste. The performance of duties in connection with public works was made, as under the kings, a gratuitous service.34 Owing to their higher status, the farming castes, the Goyigama in the Sinhalese areas and the Vel- lalar in the northern Tamil areas, were exempt from the obligation of service. Other castes that performed the duties that were specific to their caste were increasingly called for service on public works and building roads and bridges, these “icons of colonial rule” that Governor Barnes and his successors saw as central to consolidating British rule in Kandy, the last kingdom to fall to the Europeans.35 Rajakariya was mainly used for public works in the districts that belonged to the former Kandyan kingdom. The extractive and unfair nature of this system of “unrecompensed compul- sory labour” came to an end in 1833 when Commissioner Colebrooke, sent to Sri Lanka as a member of the Royal Commission of Eastern Inquiry (1829–1832), recommended its “entire abolition.”36
Native convict workers were used as early as 1806, for instance, to trans-
port salt from the beach to the salterns of Magampattu in Hambantota, in the south of the island. There salt lakes formed in the dry season. Not only was the labor cheap, it was seen as a way of punishing criminals further and reforming them morally as the work involved was extremely hard and physically demanding. In some ways their plight resembled that of the Chilaw slaves, as they too were moved from their places of abode to far- away destinations. The convicts of Magampattu were used for other work too, repairing roads and clearing canals alongside laborers paid by the day when work in the salterns was sparse.37 Alongside convict labor, wage labor was already common in the early nineteenth century, coexisting with raja- kariya, slave, and other forms of bonded labor. In the minute of Novem- ber 16, 1825, a “Schedule of rates of daily Pay to Coolies or Labourers employed in the Service of Government on the Public Works” listed rates per day for the nine districts in the maritime provinces. A worker in the saltern in Hambantota would receive 6d (VOC duits), while a laborer in Jaffna would receive half of this sum. “Boys” would be paid one-third or two-thirds of the pay of an able-bodied laborer and were very much sought after.38 Wage labor was in existence in spite of the compulsory services sys- tem that would have had the effect of draining the supply of laborers. It had been and was used by the government, missionaries, and local inhabitants—the Salagamas employed wage labor to avoid serving in the Cinnamon Department.39 In Dutch Ceylon there is evidence of wages
being paid by VOC officials to unskilled laborers such as craftsmen’s ser- vants and coolies and skilled laborers such as carpenters, masons, and smiths, although the majority of the population was not working for wages under early VOC rule.40 The circulation of coins as early as the sixteenth century in trading centers on the coast and in the hinterlands as well as occur- rences of “hired labour i.e. labour working for money wages” in the Kan- dyan areas further testify to the availability of wage labor before the nineteenth century.41 R. N. Dewasiri suggests that in the late eighteenth century in the areas under VOC rule, the rajakariya system had mutated into a “quasi wage-labor system,” where instead of getting accommodes- sans for their services, carpenters, sawyers, and other workers were often given monetary payments.42 Another illustration of the existence of a wide- spread concept of wage for labor in the eighteenth century was the common practice of people in Jaffna, and to a lesser extent in the Sinhalese areas, to buy themselves out of their rajakariya service by paying a fine. In 1695 it is estimated that 24,641 people paid fines to avoid rajakariya in the Jaffna area.43 While these figures are revealing of a transformation in labor relations and the distribution of labor time in the island between caste- related labor, wage labor, and subsistence agriculture that had begun long before the onset of the Colebrooke-Cameron reforms, for the purpose of this chapter the figures also shed light on the strategies deployed by enslaved people to navigate the routes toward an end of enslavement.
It is obvious, then, that Jaffna in particular had been a money economy
long before the arrival of Europeans. Government revenue was collected in cash, and it was common for the king of Jaffna to pay for his adminis- trators, soldiers, and headmen in cash.44 The value of money and what it could buy was not an unknown fact in Jaffna in the 1820s when the Chi- law experiment was mooted.
Before the Chilaw experiment, other schemes had been tested and tried. The labor shortage during the first decades of British rule had led to vari- ous plans to introduce Indian and Chinese migrant workers, whose believed sense of industriousness would, it was hoped, contrast with the indolence of the natives. Governor Maitland’s term of office saw two unsuccessful attempts from 1810 at settling Chinese workers from the Malay peninsula near the naval base of Trincomalee in the eastern part of the island. Under Governor Brownrigg in 1813, Indian Christians from Tanjore were more successfully settled in the island. Throughout the 1820s the idea resurfaced but was not implemented. The Chinese workers/settlers soon became
“a burden to Government without benefit,” taking up “gambling, and profligate pursuits or idleness.”45
The Contract
Enslaved men who were leaving for Chilaw were issued certificates of emancipation that would be deposited at the kachcheri office in Jaffna until they had completed their term of labor. An agreement was signed by them and kept by the collector of Jaffna. This constituted a significant departure from the past, when only slave masters were entitled to sign legal papers on matters relating to the lives of enslaved people. The signature, even if a cross or a fingerprint, was a symbolic performance of personhood. The collector of Chilaw in turn was to be sent regular and correct lists of the names of enslaved people dispatched for labor.
The agreement signed did not have the feature of a labor contract, as the later indenture/engagement contract would have in plantation colo- nies such as Mauritius, Reunion, or Guyana, nor did it resemble slave bonds that proved ownership of a slave by a master and transfer to a new propri- etor. The indenture/engagement contract that came into place in British and French colonies after the abolition of slavery derived from and con- joined other existing contracts, namely, those of sailors and agrarian labor- ers.46 It was even more probably derivative of indenture contracts issued to Europeans who moved as bondsmen or bondswomen to the Americas in the eighteenth century. Such a contract stipulated that the master pays for the voyage and maintenance of the contracted servant in exchange for his or her labor for a determined period, generally five or six years.47
The contract issued for the Chilaw laborers was quite singular in its content and form, and could have also derived from a preconception among its creators of what constituted a labor contract in Britain in 1820. In the metropolis, contracts were regulated by statutes dealing with mas- ters and servants, and the law made it a criminal offense for a worker to break his contract, whereas any breach by an employer was considered a civil offense only. These terms were codified in the Master and Servants Act of 1823.
The agreement was signed by a collective, a batch of enslaved people, and the terms enunciated upon which emancipation was granted accord- ing to Regulation 9 of 1818, which revealed the nature of the labor that
would be performed and what the slave would receive in return. To a cer- tain extent, but in an extremely loose manner, the agreement codified labor relations. It stated that the signatories would have to work as a labor- ers for the term of one year, “receiving during that time a seer of rice and five pies daily.”48 Furthermore, the enslaved people could work for the emancipation of their families serving a time “as shall be proportionate to the sum advanced calculating at the rate of seven and a half rix dollars the month.” To extract as much labor as possible, the agreement ended with the ominous clause that “male children shall give their labor to govern- ment during that period gratuitously.”49
The contract did not stipulate the amount of hours of work that each emancipated slave was expected to serve, which suggests that all his time was provided to serve his employer. Unlike contracts issued to sailors, there was no penalty for desertion in the agreement. The suggestion made by the collector of Jaffna to the magistrate of Point Pedro in 1820 that upon completion of the term of work, which he refers to as “servitude,” and if the slave had “behaved well and wishes it,” he would be settled on gov- ernment lands and grants and assistance provided to him to bring these lands into cultivation is not inserted as a condition in the contract.50 In Brazil in the 1850s–1880s, a system of conditional manumission was intro- duced in which, upon signing a labor contract, the slave was nominally free and at the same time subject to a form of compulsory labor.51 This agreement thus bore some resemblance to an indenture document of the later decades but with the conditional aspect of freedom attached to it and with some notable differences, as, for instance, the final clause about labor extraction from children of slaves. The indentured worker of the late nine- teenth century signed a contract as an individual, unlike the cohort of emancipated slaves.
The collective signatories of this sort of contract all belonged to the so- called slave castes, the Coviyar, Nalavar, and Pallar, whom Dutch colo- nialism had redefined as slaves in the eighteenth century (chap. 3). Even among them, there were perceived hierarchies that were reflected in the monetary value of their laboring bodies. The commodification of the bod- ies of enslaved people was naturalized by colonial officials who deter- mined the rules governing the value of a slave in the Regulations of 1818 and 1821. The idea of placing a value on a human as a market product was implicit in the centuries of slave trading. Yet after the abolition of the trade in 1807, the British in Sri Lanka continued to abide by this notion by
differentiating between the compensation given to Coviyar mothers, on the one hand, and Pallar and Nalavar mothers, on the other. By agreeing to compensate slaveholders in Jaffna for their losses incurred according to a putative value of the enslaved, British rule was in effect accepting the commodification of bodies and that enslaved bodies had differing pecuni- ary values. We do not know the value enslaved people placed on their own personhood since, in order to become free, they went along with the terms set.52 The manner of establishing the value of a slave who wished to be emancipated was enunciated in clause 21 of Regulation 9 of 1818. Any slave had the right to apply to the provincial court, which would then summon the proprietor in writing. Five valuators, of whom two would be chosen by the proprietor and two by the slave and the last appointed by the court, should fix a fair price to be paid by the slave to the proprietor. The slave would then be issued a certificate of emancipation.53 In June 1820 fifty slaves had been emancipated by government purchase for a total sum of 2,497 rix dollars, for an average per man of 50.9 rix dollars. “The average value of the Nallua and Palla slaves of about 30 years of age has not been found to exceed 30 or 35 rix dollars.”54
Nalavars and Pallars were the preferred group as far as purchase of free-
dom was concerned, as Coviyars were believed to not be “at all well adapted for labour” and “being rated at much higher value.”55 The collector men- tioned a few instances when the “valuation of the Covia slave conjointly with his family had nearly tripled the amount authorized to be expended by Government.” He had on those occasions not followed through with freeing the slave. However, he was ready to pay more than the amount stipulated if the slave had family members who were “capable of rendering efficient service,” and if the slave engaged himself to extend his term of service.56
The cost of the emancipated bodies was enunciated as an “aggregate sum paid for the freedom of themselves and their families” to the proprietors. This sum was a matter of concern for the authorities in Colombo. In 1825 the collector received a letter from the governor’s office questioning the “large sum of eight thousand eight hundred and ten Rix dollars advanced to the proprietors of emancipated slaves.”57 Another missive further dwelt on the issue of the cost of purchasing Coviyar slaves in particular, which was seen to considerably exceed that of the two other castes, and the fact that Coviyar, who were chiefly employed as domestics in Jaffna, were not suited to hard labor in Chilaw. The governor was favorable to their
emancipation as long as it cost no more than that of the Pallars and Nala- vars.58 A parsimonious colonial government was vehemently upholding an equal monetary value for all slaves.
Flow of Workers, 1820–1829
The Jaffna kachcheri issued a circular to all magistrates in the area impress- ing on them that the “government was extremely desirous of obtaining the emancipation of as many slaves as possible, particularly those of the Nal- lua and Palla castes,” according to the government advertisement of July 15, 1820.59 On August 2 thirty-one emancipated slaves were dispatched to Chilaw.60. On August 31 the collector of Jaffna informed the governor’s office that another “64 persons who have been emancipated from slavery” had been dispatched to Jaffna. He included a list of their names and added that it had been necessary to advance “batta” to each individual in the proportion of eight seers of rice and four fanams in cash.61 The language of the officials in the otherwise bland and dry missives is revealing in one respect: emancipated slaves were referred to as “persons,” a quality that was not recognized in them as long as they remained the property of someone else. From being a traded commodity, they had by virtue of signing a labor contract graduated to personhood. The belief that enslaved people were capable of reason, morality, and diligence was not explicit in the official cor- respondence in the island. Yet across the seas such ideas were becoming more acceptable among Christian reformers and antislavery proponents. Enslaved persons were given numbers, as, for example, the four deserters who were sent back and were listed as numbers: No. 33, No. 38, No. 86, No. 88.62
In October another batch of fifty to sixty persons of the Nalavar and
Pallar castes were sent to Chilaw, and a few weeks later parties of thirty- two and eleven followed.63 In November a list of sixteen emancipated slaves sent to Chilaw was shared with the government in Colombo.64 In 1820 approximately 191 emancipated slaves were sent to Chilaw. This number was clearly insufficient in the view of the government, and the governor sent instructions to cease advancing money for the purchase of emanci- pated slaves, publicly announcing that no further applications would be attended to.65 In response, the collector attempted to redeem the scheme by stating its effects: not only were 191 men emancipated, but 348 others— wives, children, and relatives—had benefited from the scheme. The main
obstacle was, in his view, the negative influence of the proprietors, who were actively dissuading their slaves from engaging in this scheme.66
The collector seemed to have convinced the authorities, since the fol- lowing year saw another case of labor consisting of emancipated slaves in March 1821, with the construction of a new canal in Chilaw between Jag- ampattoo and Meddapalale in the Pettigal Korale. The expenditure for the canal was 19,935.10½ rix dollars. The work was completed in 1828 with the use of various types of labor. The remarks in the Blue Book are revealing: “This work was originally intended to be performed by slaves from Jaffna with a view to gain the emancipation of themselves and fami- lies, as requested by the Governor’s Dispatch to Lord Bathurst no 64 of 11 March 1821 and of Sir James Campbell no 46 of 23d Dec 1823, and approved by his Lordship under date 17th June 1821 No 41.” There seems, however, to have been a dearth of slaves willing to work on the canal under the conditions laid out: “as the work advanced and the number of slaves that came forward to be emancipated by these means were less than expected, it became expedient to employ other labourers from time to time.”67
During the early years of British rule, a pioneer corps of Indian labor- ers, composed of bricklayers, carpenters, and artificers paid on contract, had been constituted for petty irrigation works. Unlike the emancipated slave workforce, who received only a batta or special allowance, these men were paid salaries. They were placed under the collector of each district as a corps of pioneers. In 1804 the pioneers were diverted from civil to mili- tary control and attached to various regiments fighting the war against the Kandyan kingdom. After the fall of the kingdom, the pioneer corps was once again diverted to public works under the supervision of European offi- cers. They worked in divisions of four hundred to eight hundred men alongside customary laborers.68. In 1821 Governor Barnes recruited pio- neers from the Coromandel Coast.69.
In 1822, according to the minute of February 5, 1822, the governor approved the purchase of the emancipation of 300 slaves of Nalavar and Pallar caste and their families, a measure that would “permanently benefit that class of people and the government,” and moved that the collector of Jaffna be authorized to advance sums necessary for purchasing their eman- cipation.70 In 1824 there were still more than 15,000 slaves in the northern province. That year large groups of emancipated slaves left Jaffna accom- panied by a “peon” to work on the Chilaw canal. In August and October,
30 and 101 emancipated slaves, respectively, were mentioned in an official communication as having been sent to Chilaw.71 A month later the collec- tor of Jaffna referred to sending 46 and then 62 men to Chilaw, forming “a party of slaves who have accepted emancipation on the terms offered by the government.”72 A group of 22 followed shortly thereafter.73 It was clear that emancipation was given in exchange of labor, but it remained unclear what type of arrangement was made, or if it was different from the initial scheme.
A letter of August 16, 1825, from the collector of Jaffna helps us piece together the reasons for a decline in numbers. He stated that 1,323 slaves have been emancipated under the minute of the September 3, 1824, but then referred to “a few deaths at Chilaw among the slaves” as a possible reason for the decrease in the number to be procured. He remained opti- mistic, however, that the required number will be attained, as many Coviyars appeared to wish to “work their emancipation,” but from the let- ter it seems that he was not allowed to recruit them. He now asked permis- sion to use this source of labor.74 Coviyar slaves were generally household slaves in Vellalar homes and hence not deemed suitable for the hard labor of building a canal.
Notice of slaves emancipated by purchase by the government appears again in 1826 in a letter from the then collector of Jaffna in which he referred to the auditor general’s remarks in civil warrant no. 130 for November 1825. The auditor’s query concerned the voucher of C. Scott, collector of Jaffna, for an amount spent between March 20, 1823, and October 31, 1825, for the purchase of slaves for the use of government “as authorised by Minutes of Council dated 28 October 1822 and 23 September 1824.” The auditor general asked to specify the number of slaves purchased and in the absence of “acquittances of the proprietors” imposed a surcharge. The collector contended that the large part of the money mentioned in the voucher had been spent, and that “it is impossible to procure the signatures of all the proprietors of the slaves emancipated on account of government many of them being dead or others absent from the district.” He requested that the auditor “accept the bonafide of the transaction of purchase of slaves and withdraws the surcharge.”75 On July 18, however, the collector made clear in a letter that the governor was not ready to dispense with the acquit- tances, and he therefore asked the auditor general for a delay of six weeks to assemble the proprietors of the emancipated slaves on account of govern- ment.76 Ten days later the collector was able to provide some accounts: the
amount of 140.17 pounds “was expended for the purchase of Palla and Nallua slaves as authorized by the Minute in Council of the 28th Octo- ber 1822 and 23d September 1824.”77
Again in 1826, the purchase of slaves for use by the government was authorized by minutes of Council dated July 4, 1826.78 That year there was a trickle of slaves going to Chilaw, and it seemed that more Coviyars were engaged, in spite of their high value—seventy rix dollars—perhaps due to the lack of Nalavar and Pallar workers.79 Work was going on in the Chi- law district, with the deepening of several parts of the inland navigation connected with the canal. Emancipated slaves and other laborers were deepening the canal between Puttalam Lake and Andepana Lake.80 The soil was “found to be of so firm clay” that it required more labor. During the rainy season, when the area was underwater and the work was inter- rupted, emancipated slaves were used to raise the road between Thabbowa and Tommodera Bridge, which ran the risk of being washed away due to the floods.81
Registers of slaves sent to Chilaw indicate that until November 1829 the system of emancipation in exchange for labor was still functioning.82 Work on the Chilaw canal was over, however, and instructions were sent to the collector at Jaffna to use labor that had been “purchased” either to collect materials, to burn lime, or to help in the digging of the proposed tank at Poolonne. More purchase of slaves would be discontinued until “public work of sufficient magnitude and importance” would make the recourse to that measure useful.83
The work on the Chilaw canals led to an increase in the value and future value of the lands surrounding them. In the early 1820s the British gave a few members of the Sinhalese elite land grants with the hope that they would continue to grow cinnamon. To the government’s distress, most Sin- halese landowners were more interested in coconut plantations, which required a relatively small labor force and low maintenance. Adrian Jayewar- dene, known as “tambi mudaliyar,” was rewarded for his services to the British in the war against the Kandyan kingdom with a large landholding in Chilaw that amounted to 2,612 acres at his death in 1830.84 He seems to have appropriated much more land than the government intended to give him, and his landholding was exceptionally large. Others also received grants, but from March 1824 land had to be purchased. The Corea family, whose ancestor Christoffel Corea had supported the king of Kandy, became the leading family and landowner in the Chilaw area. The evidence of
Johannes Corea Wijesekere Abeyratne, mudaliyar of Alut Kuru korale and Negombo, in response to questions posed to him by the Colebrooke- Cameron Commission on March 8, 1830, gives some interesting insights into the expansion of cultivated land in Chilaw in that decade. In 1830 Johannes Corea’s lands consisted of 107 acres in the Chilaw district and 110 acres in Alut Kuru Korale between Negombo and Colombo. Of this, 100 acres were paddy and 117 high ground: 25 acres of coconut, jackfruit, and areca, 90 acres of young coconuts, and only 2 uncultivated. He had purchased 10 acres of cash crop land under the Proclamation of March 2, 1824, and governor’s address of June 24, 1825. His lands, he wrote, were cultivated by “servants” who were fed and clothed and whose “parents are now and then, supplied with Paddy, Money, and Cloths, in consideration of the Services of their children.” The status of these servants remains unclear. Could they have been children of debt-ridden parents in neigh- boring villages, loaned temporarily for labor and services? We also learn that agricultural labor received a share of produce, while laborers were paid three or four fanams a day. Johannes Corea had 1,500 bearing coconut trees and nearly 5,000 young trees and had transplanted his cinnamon plants to the government garden.85 While colonial rule blunted potential dissent by providing occasions for local elites to establish themselves in the new role of coconut plantation owners, they enforced harsh conditions on the labor force that was opening up the Chilaw district with the construction of a new canal.
Chilaw: Lives of Labor
The workforce employed to open the canal from Kudawewa to Thabbowa constituted by emancipated slaves was supervised by representatives of the state. Statements of expenses sent by the collector of Chilaw to Colombo provide some insight into the various groups involved. The overseer of the canal work was, in 1828, a man named Goldlieb. He was supported by a superintendent called Don Adrian de Silva, mudaliyar. Different worlds of labor coexisted until the mid-nineteenth century, more or less coerced, more or less free, working in conditions “analogous to slavery,” to borrow Frederick Cooper’s expression. Alongside the emancipated slaves were a large contingent of “coolies” who were part of the pioneer corps. In July and August 1821, for instance, the number of paid laborers/coolies
working on the canal varied between 285 and 426.86 They seem to have performed specific tasks, such as carrying the mammotties necessary for the work from Colombo to Chilaw and transporting the sand from Mara- caly to the canal. They were paid in copper money. A coolie was sent to Colombo to bring the weights used to weigh the money dispensed to the laborers.87
The line between coolie and emancipated slave gets blurred as the decade comes to an end. In October 1829 emancipated slaves were employed at Natandy and paid a daily pay of nine pence. A kangany was going to be recruited to supervise their work. Unfortunately there are few details as to the type of person that the collector intended to recruit and the roles he was expected to perform. The distribution of responsibilities was as fol- lows: the collector would inspect the work done on a weekly basis, while the kangany, “a trusted person,” would be with them on days the collector was not present.88 Familiarity with labor management would suggest that the foreman would have had some authority over the workers and hence was most probably a headman. Colonial officials would have thought that incorporating a traditional figure of authority in a new context was a via- ble managerial strategy. The kangany would become a familiar face in the next decades when plantation labor on coffee and tea estates had to be man- aged by an intermediary who was also an insider. This function, as it is mentioned in the Chilaw labor context, announces the future labor regime where the kangany emerged as “an indispensable part of labor organiza- tion in mills, ports and plantations . . . in the tropical colonies where Indian emigrants went for work.”89
In the Register of Slaves Emancipated by Government on the Condi- tions Stated by the Deputy’s Secretary of September 24, 1824, and sent to Chilaw on May 12, 1829, one gets a glimpse of these individual lives (see fig. 4.3). The twenty-seven slaves were numbered from 367 to 394, and their names indicate their caste. Nagy Wayreven Pallu was one among six Pal- lars, and there were seventeen Coviyars and four Nalavars. They came from different villages—Pallaly, Poottore, and Mandowila—and their ages var- ied from sixteen to forty-five. The time of service indicates more than one year and up to two years, five months, and fourteen days. The table included in detail the amount of money paid for the emancipation of the men and the amount paid for the family to the slave proprietors either to let them go to work for a limited period of time or for their actual liberation. For instance, the freedom of Wally Cadiren, a Coviyar from Pallaly, would have
Image
Figure 4.3 Register of slaves emancipated by government, September 24, 1824 (SLNA Lot 6/971A, September 24, 1824, with permission of Sri Lanka National Archives)
cost the government one pound, seventeen shillings, and six dimes, and of his family five pounds, eighteen shillings, and six dimes. Most interesting are the appended remarks: many of the slaves were “serving” not for their own liberation but for that of a father, father–in-law, their family, wife, or children, and even grandmother in the case of twenty-year-old Marial Soosa from Pallaly.90
Of their lives after work, little is known except through the lists and tables compiled by the collector accounting for the subsistence of emanci- pated slaves. In 1821 there is no mention of food consumed other than rice.91 A year later the collector of Chilaw sent a letter to Colombo asking for authorization to buy 213 cans of arrack at three fanams per can for the emancipated slaves, the total value being 53.2 rix dollars.92
Sickness and Death
The deaths of emancipated slaves in Chilaw appear in the archive in an anecdotal fashion as the collector of Chilaw sends notice of deaths to Colombo. There are no reliable statistics regarding mortality rate on such public works, and no reference to funerals or cemeteries. Were the corpses
thrown into unmarked graves or tossed into the sea without any religious ceremony? On June 29 Perial Siwelly, a Pallar of Odepitty, died, and on July 9 and 10 Sinny Colenden and Cotty Canden passed away. The deaths of two emancipated slaves named Perial Weelen and Anditchy Sinneven on July 24 were reported.93 Five men had died within a month. What were the causes of these deaths, and could they have been prevented? Lives seemed expendable. On October 10, 1824, Cadiren Canden, whose vil- lage or caste is not mentioned, also “departed his life,” and in December another two men died.94 Men continue to die in the following year—nine in the single month of January 1825.95
Chilaw hospital was host to many ill emancipated slaves during the 1820s. Governor North had established hospitals in the early years of Brit- ish rule, essentially to inoculate people against smallpox. In 1802 vaccina- tion against the disease had been introduced, and by 1805 more than ten thousand people had been vaccinated, especially in the Southwest and Colombo, where Buddhist Sinhalese were less hostile to vaccination than in the northern areas.96 In the four large districts of the island—Colombo, Jaffna, Galle, and Trincomalee—there were full-fledged hospitals, while the twelve smaller ones initially had only a medical overseer visiting peo- ple in houses.97 In the 1820s the hospital was probably not large enough to accommodate large contingents of sick people.
One escapee slave from the hospital was described in an official letter as suffering from a “sore mouth.”98 This might have been a symptom of scurvy, where ulceration of the mouth and bleeding accompanies fatigue and pain in the limbs. A starch-based diet without fresh meat and citrus was bound to lead to such sicknesses. Feigning illness, too, was possibly a strategy used to avoid excruciating work; hence the high proportion of “hospital stoppage.” These were the less serious types of illness when compared to the epidemics that ravaged large numbers in the 1820s.
In 1819 a cholera epidemic that emerged out of the Ganges delta stem- ming from contaminated rice, traveled along trade routes, and broke out in the island, reaching Jaffna in December. It “produced dreadful devasta- tion on the western coast of Ceylon.”99 There were insufficient numbers of surgeons—only five in Colombo, Kandy, and Trincomalee, and one assistant surgeon each in Trincomalee, Badulla, Alupota, and Jaffna. There were no private practitioners. During the epidemic one medical officer had to oversee patients in Chilaw and Puttalam, thirty miles away.100
The work conditions would have been extremely harsh when one looks at the hospital bills of the emancipated slaves in Chilaw from February 23 to March 23, 1821, submitted by the medical subassistant. One does not come across any reference to housing or sanitation facilities, and bringing laborers from Jaffna with inadequate prior planning and enforcing strict labor regimens would have weakened them considerably and worn out their energy. During this month alone, seventy-one slaves were admitted to the hospital, and some of them, such as Nadie Kaderen, remained there for twenty-four days.101 The nature of the illnesses was not included in the accounts, but the “dark horrors” of cholera as described by Emerson Ten- nent would explain the long periods spent by the workers in the hospital apart from the usual food-related diseases due to the poor quality of the rice and wounds and sores of all kinds due to the heat and working condi- tions. Like enslaved workers throughout the Indian Ocean world from the Ile Bourbon to the Cape, workers in Chilaw would have been vulnerable to endemic diseases such as cholera for which they had no immunity.102 For cholera there was still no cure or prevention measure available. In the years that followed, emancipated slaves continued to be admitted to the hospital under the charge of a medical subassistant named J. H. Vansenden.103
Petitions
Emancipated slaves on occasion made demands concerning their living conditions as they were probably aware of the shortage of labor available for public works owing to the reluctance of people to comply with raja- kariya. This provided them with some room to negotiate better terms of employment. Their claims took shape either in the form of a petition addressed from the slave to the governor or in a letter from the collector to the chief secretary “on behalf of the slave.” They complained, in 1826, that sand was mixed with their rice rations and demanded better quality rice, a demand that was supported by the collector, who admitted the rice grains were of bad quality.104 Other petitions related to possibilities of shar- ing the burden of labor. A man from Jaffna named Weerawen asked to be permitted to serve one year on behalf of his brother as an emancipated slave who was working at the canal and had two more years to complete his term. The collector of Chilaw wrote a letter to the governor on behalf of Weerawen, supporting the request as the man was “strong and able
bodied.”105 The only petition signed by an emancipated slave was a simi- lar request by Sinnacanden of Jaffna written in the obsequious and self- demeaning language typical of the genre, addressed to Governor Barnes. He used words such as “with due veneration” and “humbly” in order to approach “the worthy feet” of the governor. His plea was to be allowed to serve for eight more months in order to reduce the period of his aunt’s son. The petition bears only a cross as a signature, the mark of Sinnacanden.106 It shows the strength of familial ties, where a man is ready to work for the freedom of the son of his aunt, the reason given being “so as to reach their Country in time.” In time for what is not revealed. Was his translator, whose name appears in the corner of the petition, A. Solomon, using this overly self-deprecating language because of his own reading of the infe- rior status of the petitioner? In many ways the petition resembled in its form, style, and codes those written by professional petition writers for indentured laborers in other contexts, such as Mauritius or South Africa.
Running Away
The first emancipated slave to run away from Chilaw was Coty Waireven of Pallali, who absconded on September 11, 1820. He deserted Puttalam in the night and appeared to have returned to Jaffna. The fear of the collector of Chilaw was that unless he was apprehended “in all probability others will follow his example.”107 Indeed, fourteen more followed on September 28.
list of emancipated Jaffna slaves who deserted from [word illegible] on the night of
september 28, 1820
33 Nagy Tawesy Palla of Poetter 36 Natty Sinnewevy ditto
37 Sinnie Wayreven ditto 38 Nagie Wayreven ditto
56 Modelie Andie Palla of Pallalie 58 Pattie Caderen Palla of Poettor 60 Pattie Modelier Palla of Sirapetty 68 Harie Canden Palla of Poettor
69 Sandie Weenasy Palla of Anerencal 85 Pocken Nielen Palla of Pottoer
86 Canden Andie ditto 87 Madie Canden ditto 88 Maroedie Tawesi ditto
89 Poedecal Wayreven ditto108
They were all Pallars and came from four villages, mainly Pottoer but also Pallalie, Sirapetty, and Anerencal. In October Cotty Piriam, an emanci- pated slave who had deserted but whose name was not on the list, was apprehended and “punished for his conduct.” He was sent back to Chilaw with a new batch of emancipated slaves.109. Others followed and were often caught in Jaffna and sent back to Chilaw. Nally Wayreven and Aynal Nal- lauwe were escorted by a detachment of sepoys proceeding to Colombo in April 1821. Each laboring man counted enough for such effort in recap- turing them and forcing them to work for their freedom. Over the decade there was a regular movement of runaways to and fro, punished and sent back.110 The record on runaway slaves, however, is haphazard and incom- plete when one compares it with the rich material available for Mauritius, where “marron” registers of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth cen- turies provide a host of information on fugitive slaves, including date of desertion and capture and return.111
On October 2, 1821, Wallheoff informed the government that “on the
morning of Saturday last” two emancipated slaves had fled from their workplace. They were identified as Nienievel Tawisiel, a Nallua aged thirty, and Poedial Caderen, a Palla aged twenty-five. Both men came from the same village of Wasawolaanse. The only remark is that they deserted on the evening of September 10, 1821. Within two days of receiving notice of their flight, the Colonial Secretary’s Office (CSO) informed the collector of Jaffna that these two emancipated slaves had “deserted from Coddew- eve in the Chilaw district while they were employed agreeable to their engagement.” They were to be apprehended, “punished,” and sent back to Wallheoff.112 A few weeks later, on October 30, two more slaves ran away from the same location supervised by Wallheoff—a Palla aged forty- five from Mottuwil and a Nallua aged twenty-two.113
What awaited runaways returning to Jaffna was probably a new situa- tion where power had shifted away from the hands of the proprietor.
Reading through the case of Sedoowy Poody, the wife of an emanci- pated slave still working in Chilaw, one sees new lines of confrontation come to the fore. Sedoowy asked for redress for a “certain case of oppres- sion” done to her by her former proprietor in Jaffna. There are no details except that it relates to land and produce, which the proprietor is pre- sumably trying to deprive her of. There are no records of families joining the men working in Chilaw, nor are there details of the lives of the fami- lies of emancipated slaves who remained in Jaffna and worked with the former proprietors of the emancipated worker. Grief and despair in par- ticular are absent from the source material available to historians.
Emancipated slaves continued to desert their workplace in Chilaw to run away back to Jaffna. Poodie Castan of Poetoir in the Jaffna district was one of them in 1825 to be sought after by the collector of Jaffna.114 The fact that many were apprehended and sent back shows that they were probably not aware that the collector of Chilaw would notify the chief secretary to give necessary orders to his colleague in Jaffna to react to the disappear- ance of a single slave. Communication among the different officials in Chi- law, Colombo, and Jaffna was fast enough to take the runaway by surprise, once he returned to his village.
By 1829 the collector of Chilaw had a more systematic method to apprehend fugitive emancipated slaves. The case of Seduwy Maylow, who deserted from the Puttalam canal, exemplifies a slightly more detailed taxonomic apparatus. There is a certain incongruity in inform- ing the governor of the island of the escape of a single emancipated slave, but it is perhaps understandable since the collector appealed to the gover- nor to publicize a description of the runaway in the Gazetteer to supple- ment his prior correspondence with collectors of Mannar and Jaffna. The description of the emancipated slave gave details of the name, caste, vil- lage, age, complexion, and height of the man: No. 403 Seduwy Maylow, Palla of Caydaty, thirty years of age, pale color, and short.115 Thus caste and complexion came out quite predictably as important markers that defined the colonized in the eye of the colonizer. What specific measures were taken to find and apprehend the fugitives is not known, but given the small numbers involved it was probably not a system comparable to the chasseurs de police or slave patrols employed in Mauritius as special forces charged with hunting marron slaves (runaways) who took refuge in the forests and mountains.116
Amelioration in Ceylon and Other Colonies
The Chilaw experiment needs to be read in the context of amelioration policies introduced in British colonies. In the 1820s the British Empire wit- nessed a quickening of a legal transformation that had begun in the previ- ous century. The Society for the Mitigation and Gradual Abolition of Slav- ery Throughout the British Dominions Throughout the British Empire, which was formed in 1823, still had a small membership of five lords and fourteen members of the House of Commons. The registration of slaves that had been pressed for since 1812 by James Stephen Sr. showed some success with slave registration acts passed in all the Caribbean colonies by 1820 and the setting up of a central registry dedicated to the maintenance of colonial registers by act of parliament.117 The first legislation for ame- liorating slavery was introduced in 1824, a year after the founding of the Anti-Slavery Society. It was in Trinidad that the first experiment was made with the introduction of an office of the guardian of slaves that was supposed to adjudicate between slaves and their masters. The legislation permitted slave marriages, allowed slaves to give evidence in court, and forbade the separation by sale of mothers and children as well as the flog- ging of slave women.118 It was expected that local legislatures and legisla- tive councils in the various colonies would pass their own version of the order. As Secretary Canning in the House of Commons said: “It is hoped that other colonies will follow an example so set, without the apprehen- sion of danger.”119
Ceylon was an example of a sort. During the debates in the House of
Lords pertaining to the West Indies, Earl Bathurst, secretary of state to war and to the colonies, rhetorically asked, “Where were instances to be found of a transition from servile to free labour, in circumstances similar to those of our West India colonies?” “Ceylon,” he said, “had been appealed to, where the same kind of slaves existed, and had been manumitted; but in that island they were a minority.”120 Legislation in Ceylon regarding eman- cipation of children of slave women had indeed been passed in 1818 and 1821, seemingly independently of directives from London. Much of what was suggested in the Trinidad order had already been achieved in Ceylon. In Cape Colony, Ordinance 19 of June 1826 realigned amelioration with the Trinidad model, albeit with a few changes. While Christianity was no longer required for slaves to marry, children under the age of ten, rather than of sixteen as in Trinidad, could not be separated from their mother,
and all slaves could testify in court. Most important, a guardian of slaves was established to adjudicate on cases brought out by slaves against their masters.
On the whole, in all British colonies, colonial assemblies and councils were slow at implementing the amelioration orders. Finally, the British gov- ernment abolished slavery in the West Indies and Cape Colony in 1834. A number of other schemes were put forward in 1833, including a plan drafted by Henry Taylor that proposed a system where slaves could purchase their freedom by installments. His recommendation that the British government partly buy a slave’s freedom was reminiscent of the Chilaw system. Slaves would employ some days of the week to earn money to purchase their free- dom and in the process acquire qualities such as industriousness. This was seen as a gradual introduction to wage labor once full freedom was granted. The calculation was that a strong male slave would be able to be free in three years. Naturally this system was detrimental to frail and weak people.121
The culmination of these debates in Britain was thus a compromise: the Slavery Abolition Act of August 28, 1833, provided for the award of twenty million pounds sterling to the owners of “slave property” in the British colonies but exempted Ceylon, St. Helena, and the territories under East India Company rule, such as India. Furthermore, the slave was bound to unpaid labor for a further four to six years from August 1, 1834, through a system of “apprenticeship.” The compensation regime established by this act led to the creation of a Slave Compensation Commission, which han- dled “forty-five thousand individual claims from owners of eight hundred thousand enslaved.” Statistical work on a number of the colonies involved has thrown much light on slaveholding, revealing that more than half of the compensation was paid to metropolitan British masters, and half of that went to a rentier class.122
In many British colonies, such as Trinidad, the legislation relating to slave registration and the idea of compensation for slaveholders were key policy initiatives by abolitionists who were looking to reform slavery in the short term while viewing abolition as a long-term goal. These mea- sures acted as a prelude to full emancipation. During this period compensation—generally understood as a financial indemnity in the form of monetary payment, land, or forced labor (apprenticeship)—was paid to slave proprietors not only in Britain but also in France, the Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden, the District of Columbia, and countries in South
America as well as to resident slaveholders in the colonies concerned.123 As Susan Thorne has argued in an insightful discussion of the 1833 act, “com- pensation, in short, contained abolition’s implications within the amoral economy of free market capitalism.”124 The Ordinance of 1844 finally brought the emancipation of slaves in the British crown colony of Ceylon, ten years after the abolition of slavery in Britain’s Atlantic and Indian Ocean colonies.
There was, however, a particular moment of “amelioration” or gradual abolition of slavery shared by Britain’s three new colonies, Ceylon, Mau- ritius, and Cape Colony, that took very different shapes owing to a num- ber of factors, including the difference in the organization of the economy and consequently the different type of labor needed at the moment of abo- lition.125 In the case of Mauritius, apprenticeship schemes described so fittingly by the abolitionist James Stephen in 1832 as a “transition from the brutal to the rational predicament” were introduced to respond to the con- tinuing need for labor on plantations.126 Apprenticeship taught former slaves no skills; rather, it was intended to teach them a discipline that would prepare them for the rationality of the market. Yet the goals of apprentice- ship in Mauritius were severely compromised by the introduction of thou- sands of “free” Indian laborers between 1834 and 1839, giving former slaves few options to negotiate with estate owners and leading to their effec- tive marginalization.
The Chilaw experiment can be read alongside other, similar labor- related experiments that were tried out in the British Empire in the period preceding the Abolition of Slavery Act of 1833. In 1823 George Hibbert suggested in the House of Commons that experimenting with manumis- sion of slaves ought to be tried out on small numbers first: “Surely in an experiment of this kind . . . it were most prudent to attempt it on 10 000 or 30 000 people, who are to be found perfectly isolated than at once to try it on . . . near a Million.”127 The early abolitionists, such as Wilberforce, believed that slave labor was wasteful and inefficient and that free labor was inherently superior according to both natural and Christian law. But until the first decades of the nineteenth century, parliamentary abolitionists remained cautious toward any practical experiments in the slave colonies. One idea put forward by Earl Percy that was brought down virulently by Wilberforce himself the day after the Slave Trade Abolition Bill of 1807 was passed was to “declare every negro child free, who shall be born in his majesty’s dominions after the 1st of January.”128 As mentioned in earlier
chapters, a variant of this scheme was implemented in Sri Lanka a few years later when Alexander Johnston, chief justice of the Supreme Court, con- vinced slaveholders to liberate the children of their slaves voluntarily in 1816. This was implemented by legislation in 1818 that brought effective liberation to the children at the age of fourteen.
According to the free labor ideology propounded by Adam Smith, the extension of freedom was the primary moral and political goal of human progress. Labor, however, was the principal theme of his Wealth of Nations. If the property of every man in his own labor was “the most sacred and inviolable foundation of all property,” slavery was in complete violation of the values of individual autonomy and social justice. Of course the prin- ciple of labor freedom was not purely founded on sentiments of morality, sacrality, or inviolability. At the core of the argument was the importance of labor freedom to maximize economic utility. Smith made his argument about the economically defective nature of slavery: “A person who can acquire no property, can have no other interest but to eat as much and to labour as little as possible. Whatever work he does beyond what is suffi- cient to purchase his own maintenance can be squeezed out of him by vio- lence only, and not by any interest of his own.”129
This chapter has shown the implicit understanding by colonial officials of enslavement of Jaffna Nalavars, Pallars, and Coviyars as the “other” of free labor. In the view of colonial administrators, in the 1820s free labor/wage labor was congruent with the liberal promise of emancipation. The fact that so many enslaved men partook in this scheme in the early 1820s indi- cates that there was an aspiration for a change in the status quo among the most humble subjects of colonial Sri Lanka; that freedom as it had been offered to them by the colonial state was a value, a quality worth the exchange of hard labor. What they imagined would follow is not known. One can only assume that their long walk from Jaffna to Chilaw shows a shared hope that, through economic industry, a person’s passage to freedom would be enacted. For today’s observer, it is clear that their passage was one simultaneously entering the being of a colonial subject, another form of oppression. As Frederick Cooper has suggested, apostles of abolitionism would never have accepted the idea that slavery and colonialism were on par in terms of evilness. Other forms of coercive colonial practices were given an “aura of normality” that slavery had shed by the early nineteenth century after long centuries of having been naturalized.130 The question
of the nature of the freedom that the emancipated slaves who worked in Chilaw acquired at the end of their term is difficult to measure. Their situ- ation bears much resemblance to that analyzed in Bihar by Gyan Prakash, where abolition of slavery by the East India Company in 1843 in effect reformulated as debt-bondage the kamia-malik relationship that had been earlier classified as slavery and serfdom. Slaves reconstituted as bonded labor would “voluntarily” move into a debt-bondage based on lease and con- tracts with their masters.131 As mentioned in the previous chapter, the sin- gular difference between the Indian and Sri Lankan situations was that the reconfiguration of certain castes of Jaffna as slaves was a condition inher- ited from the period of VOC rule in the island and thus a fait accompli for the British. British crown rule could present itself as the bearer of free- dom, eliminating in one stroke practices sanctioned by Hindu tradition and VOC rule.
In the early period, before the first slaves left Jaffna for Chilaw, the then collector viewed their potential for full moral and legal subjecthood and described their future in rosy terms: “After their time of servitude has expired such as have behaved well and wish it, will be settled in govern- ment lands and grants of the same made to them with whatever assistance may appear necessary to enable them to bring such into cultivation.”132
How many of these emancipated slaves were awarded land of their own to cultivate is not known. Was it in Chilaw or in Jaffna? What does the ethnic crucible in Chilaw mentioned by Casie Chetty reflect? It is possible that emancipated slaves joined a newly formed pool of wage labor that would have been needed for the clearing of lands belonging to the grow- ing group of local land magnates such as the Coreas or the Jayewardenas who had been given land grants or bought land and were opening vast areas for planting coconut, paddy, and other produce.
When, in the early 1840s, John Scoble wrote to the secretary of state to the colonies on behalf of the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, warning him that “the extended culture of coffee and sugar which has taken place within the last two years, will necessarily extend the evil (of slav- ery),” he believed that enslaved people from the North would, in the future, fill the needs for labor on plantations. He also displayed the preconcep- tions of his time about the superiority of wage labor over servile labor.133 Coffee needed seasonal labor from the mid-1840s onward. Yet only a few of the emancipated slaves of Jaffna would join the migrant labor on coffee plantations that was mainly brought from South India, where there was a
constant pool of landless peasants in search of work.134 Perhaps emanci- pated slaves, having escaped from legal bondage, sensed that Vellalar dom- ination was still more acceptable than becoming subjects to a finely attuned repressive labor code, the precursor of which they had experienced working in Chilaw. In the plantation era built on “free labor” that thrived in the mid-nineteenth century, the constituents of coercive social disci- pline rather than disappearing would assume a new configuration.
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