3: European Cultural Hegemony

3 A Single World-Economy and Eurocentric Culture: The Integration of Ceylon into European Economic and Cultural Systems This chapter addresses two major themes: the incorporation of particular zones into the European world-economy, and the establishment of a world hegemony in which west European cultures were to hold the most prominent position. The spatial dimensions of these are examined, particularly as they relate to Ceylon.

According to W allerstein, the incorporation of new zones into the European world-economy, usually as simple raw-material producers, has involved three major transformations: the creation of a new pattern of exports and imports, larger economic “enterprises� capable of responding to the ever changing market conditions of the world-economy, and a significant increase in the coercion of the labor force.1 The incorporation thus required the building of institutions and spaces in new zones which were compatible with those of the larger world-economy and the necessary links between these. Ceylon was incorporated into the worldeconomy through the introduction of an export-oriented cash-crop agriculture, principally coffee, destined for the British imperial market, a plantation system large enough to operate as a constituent element of the European world-economy, and the necessary communication and financial networks that converged in Colombo.

Gayathri Chakravorty Spivak and Homi Bhabha have argued that west European imperialism was not only territorial and economic but also cultural, inevitably involved in the constitution of subjects. In addition to establishing political domination and economic command, the core European states also constructed a privileged position for the knowledge, cultural systems, and worldviews that they were simultaneously developing. European expansion thus involved a complex process in which the European powers were both developing a world and a body of knowledge about that world. Robert Young argues that European thought since the Renaissance would be inconceivable without the impact of colonialism just as the history of the world since the Renaissance would be inconceivable without the 61

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effects of Europeanization.2 Moreover, the production, legitimation, and circulation of this knowledge--not least, in regard to “orientalism,” “indology,” “tropical agriculture,” “tropical architecture,” and “development”--was regulated by academic and professional institutions in the metropole. Making such knowledge hegemonic would minimize the need to use direct military power to control the colonized.

In pursuing these themes, I focus on how the process of incorporation into European economic and cultural systems was spatially manifest in Ceylon. I first examine the introduction of the coffee plantation system and the restructuring of Ceylonese society and space around it. I then briefly explore the spatial implications of the movement of people and particular plant species across the larger world-space, and the establishment of a hegemony for European perceptions and knowledge of the form of this space, particularly through cartography and surveying. Finally, I examine issues concerning the export of architecture and architectural knowledge from the metropole and its influence on the Ceylonese landscape, urban forms, and architecture.

Incorporation of Ceylon into the Capitalist W orld-Economy Until the 1830s, Ceylon was not an integral part of the European worldeconomy. Despite the high demand in Europe for cinnamon, neither the Portuguese, the Dutch, nor the British were capable of organizing a system of cinnamon production in Ceylon for the European market. Instead of producing, the Portuguese and the Dutch were engaged in the gathering, collecting, and buying of cinnamon and other commodities which they then exported. British emphasis on raising sufficient revenues internally to maintain the Crown Colony government defeated every attempt of the colonial state to build a cinnamon plantation system.

A British commission of inquiry in Ceylon stated in 1833, “... besides the system of monopoly maintained and in some cases extended by the government, the power exercised by the Governor of regulating duties and imposing taxes has been injurious to commerce and to the influx and accumulation of capital.” 3 In the 1830s, however, while the imperial regime provided a market for Ceylonese coffee, the colonial state made coffee plantations a viable enterprise in Ceylon. The decline in W est Indian coffee production following the emancipation of slaves in the early nineteenth century, and the increase in demand for coffee in western Europe in the mid-nineteenth century, opened up a potential market for Ceylonese coffee. In this way, Ceylon was incorporated into the European worldeconomy by the 1850s. Import duties in the United Kingdom had earlier favored the W est Indies; while the general duty on coffee was 9d, W est Indian coffee was charged only 6d a pound. In 1835, Britain reduced the import duty on East Indian coffee also to 6d, assigning Ceylon a potential place in the imperial division of labor as a coffee producer.4 The role of the colonial state established compatible space in Ceylon, principally, large-scale cash-crop production units, to materialize this potential. As

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with the administrative reforms of the 1830s, the recommendations of the Colebrooke-Cameron Commission were central to the transformation of the Ceylonese economy. The colonial state began to actively engage in commodifying land, producing a labor force, and introducing “scientific” means of coffee cultivation.

The change was dramatic. Although there was only one coffee plantation in 1823 by the 1850s, there was a whole system, 17,583 in all. The value of coffee exports from Ceylon shot up, by twenty-five times within a decade, from a total of £31,863 in the five years between 1831 and 1835, to an annual average of £257,925 between 1841 and 1845. 5 In Tennent’s words, [the] experiment ... inaugurated in the Kandyan highlands ... within less than a quarter of a century has effected an industrial revolution in the island, converting Ceylon from a sluggish military cantonment into an enterprising British colony, and transforming the supply of one of the first requisites of the society from the western to the eastern hemisphere.6 The plantations responded to the 1840s depression in the European economy,7 and by restructuring, emerged as the dominant element of the Ceylonese economy, visa-vis the world-economy, in the 1850s.

In order to organize a coffee plantation system, the colonial state was compelled to appropriate the existing system of coffee production from the Lankan peasants as well as the coffee trading system from the Muslims. The buyers of peasant coffee were largely local Muslims who carried out internal trading, bartering peasant products for supplies brought from “outside,” lending money, and also buying land in the villages. In the early decades of the nineteenth century, the British authorities were not only unable to break into this monopoly located between their foreign trade and local producers, but also had neither the capital nor the knowledge to cultivate coffee in a more efficient way than the peasants. In the 1830s, however, the British appropriated the growing of coffee from the peasants.

The colonial state began the creation of a much needed European planter class as early as 1810 by abolishing the regulation of 1801 that forbade Europeans from owning land outside Colombo District. In 1832, following the Commission recommendations, the salaries of civil servants were reduced. More importantly, civil servants were allowed to own land in the colony and make up for their loss of income through investment in commercial agriculture. 8 This encouragement of civil servants to enter into planting explains the need for the Crown Lands Encroachment Ordinance (no.12) of 1840, the main instrument used for the commodification of land, and the sale of vast tracts of land immediately thereafter.

In order to supply land, the colonial state appropriated what it identified as “uncultivated” and “unoccupied” land, and sold these to the nascent planter class.

The state brought what was defined as “all forest, waste, unoccupied, or uncultivated lands” under the Ordinance, presuming that these were at the disposal of the Crown. This decision ignored the importance of communal land and the

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larger eco-system in the organization of Lankan villages. For the British, land simply represented privately owned isolated lots (or estates) without any social, spatial, or ecological context. The villages, however, were largely self-sufficient entities comprised of homesteads, paddy fields, and communal land which provided common amenities such as firewood, pasture, and game. In many cases, forests in the vicinity of a village were used for héns (swidden agriculture), in which villagers grew “highland” or “dry land” crops, and which were also used as sources of water and for the paths of irrigation channels. These communal lands and forests were therefore collectively consumed by the villagers, and formed a necessary component of those settlements. Although a substantial contingent of the land sold by the state was forests not adjoining the villages, their clearance affected the supply of water (for both drinking and farming) and reduced the fertility of the soil.9 “U ncultivated” and “unoccupied” lands were therefore British constructions, part of a strategy employed by the colonial state to abolish users’ rights to highlands, destabilize the “subsistence based” village organization, and commodify land for plantation purposes. According to Lankan customary law, however, the villagers had users’ rights to highlands surrounding their villages, regardless of the overlordship of the village--royal or aristocratic. Although some of the land categorized as “Crown Land” under the Ordinance was privately owned by Ceylonese, those who could not furnish proof of ownership, such as title deeds (sannas) and tax receipts, were evicted from the land they occupied, and the crops and buildings on them were confiscated. In this way, vast tracts of land were brought into the market and between 1833 and 1930 two and a half million acres of “Crown land” were sold to private individuals.10 Unlike the situation of cinnamon, with coffee, the colonial state had worked out a system that would both promote plantations and increase state revenues at the same time. Right at the outset, the pricing of land guaranteed a profit for the buyers. The land “giveaway” price was set by the state at 5s an acre, and the government officials re-sold it at an average of £2 an acre. Buyers included the Governor and many other high ranking colonial officials.11 In regard to capital for the enterprise, the Colebrooke-Cameron Commission recommended the dissociation of the state from direct involvement in the economy, simultaneously encouraging government officials to engage in commercial agriculture in their private capacity. A bank of deposit was established in 1832 to facilitate finance for economic development, and credit was easily obtained at 910% interest rate. As coffee production prospered, more British capital was invested in Ceylon from the late 1830s. For example, around 1844, the minimum cost of setting up a plantation was as high as about £3,000, but during the same year, nearly 130 coffee estates were opened up in the central province alone.12 Nevertheless, capital was a serious problem, and more so for the Ceylonese.

The greater part of the coffee plantations were owned not by companies, or big capitalists, but by small independent proprietors most of whom were short of capital. The Ceylonese who wished to join the plantations as capitalists were also short of capital, and their holdings were therefore small. Donald Snodgras has

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emphasized the extreme reluctance on the part of British banks and agency houses managing plantations to extend credit to the Ceylonese. 13 In his critical essays to the Ceylon Observer, George W all, who later became Governor, wrote in 1867 that “there was no native capital worth the name.” 14 Producing a labor force for the nascent plantation industry was the most difficult task. Persuading Kandyans to join the ranks of labor in new plantations was much more difficult than appropriating their land. The colonial state employed two principal strategies. One was taxation, a common colonial policy requiring that villagers earn a cash income. Taxes were, however, insufficient to destroy rural peasant practices; most villagers either grew a small quantity of cash crops, or worked on plantations for short periods to earn the cash necessary to pay their taxes. 15 The other colonial strategy was the abolition of the old Lankan social structures that hindered the production of a wage-labor force, namely, the tenurial system of rajakariya. Historically, Lankan land ownership, the division and control of labor, and the extraction of surplus were organized around a complex structure of land tenures, a village structure, a caste system, and rajakariya. In this system, “Service lands were held free from tax so long as the occupiers rendered the services in return for which the lands had been granted for them.” 16 According to Ralph Pieris, “The personal services to which holders of land were liable was far the most important aspect of rajakariya, for on this system of service tenures the machinery of state administration largely hinged.” 17 Since “Service holdings could as a rule be abandoned by those who wished to be free of onerous rajakariya,” 18 the service was attached more to the land than the person. The caste system organized such services (duties) into a system of occupations which, in effect, amounted to a technical division of labor.

The abolition of rajakariya was the most problematic. As with taxation, the colonial state had always attempted to achieve multiple objectives through the abolition of rajakariya. These included curtailing the power of the former Lankan “chiefs” and land holders, securing a wage labor force, and expanding the tax base.

For the colonial state, therefore, the abolition of rajakariya and the introduction of taxation were inseparable. Yet for the Lankans, these were radically different: rajakariya was a compulsory obligation and taxation was not. The average Ceylonese had always responded positively to the idea of abolishing rajakariya.

This is apparent in the evasion of rajakariya when it was restored in maritime Ceylon after the revolt of 1796-97. 19 The revolt was, therefore, largely aimed against the taxes, but not against the abolition of rajakariya itself. The conflict between the colonial regime and the villagers in regard to the meaning of abolition made it difficult for the state to produce a labor force this way. W hen the rajakariya was abolished once again in 1833, the state faced a labor shortage in completing road works begun in the 1820s.20 The census of 1891 states that the Sinhalese did not readily go into plantation “lines,” and the limited Sinhalese labor came, for the most part, from neighboring villages. In addition, the coffee berries on the estates ripened at the same time as

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those on the home gardens of the peasants, to which they gave priority. Planter and one-time Assistant Colonial Secretary, P.E. W odehouse, stated that “you cannot very often depend upon the native labour; they will at certain seasons go to work upon their rice fields, whatever you may offer them.” 21 W hat these attitudes reveal is the tension between the worldviews of the colonial regime and the villagers. As Farmer puts it: ‘underdeveloped’ societies have a different view of things which are worthy of effort, and these things do not necessarily include technical change for its own sake, or as a sign of modernity, or as a means to more efficient production. The Westerner thinking about economic affairs in an Oriental setting cannot too often remember that, if one considers the whole known range of human attitudes to work and wealth, then the modern Western attitude is seen to be highly abnormal.22 Since the strategies of the colonial state were inadequate to produce a Ceylonese labor force, both planters and state resorted to importing cheap labor from southern India. The immigration of labor to Ceylon largely began in the 1830s, increasing to a regular flow in the 1840s. Although early immigrants were seasonal workers, by the 1850s, the component of women and children had increased, suggesting that they were forming a permanent labor force. The reduction of laborers’ mobility through the accumulation of high debts to the kangani--who was both the recruiter of labor from south India and, later, the supervisor on the estate--and the replacement of coffee by tea as the main plantation crop in the 1880s--which required a permanent labor force--established this trend. As workers came with wives and children for whom there was picking work all year round, the plantation society became a distinct world segregated from the surrounding villages. In this way, the colonial state produced a coercible, landless, and stateless work force in Ceylon. 23 In addition to organizing a plantation system, the colonial state also provided the science and technology for the cultivation of coffee. This brought the knowledge base of coffee cultivation to a radically different level from that of the peasants.

The main instrument of this was the botanical garden. A botanical garden was first established near Colombo in 1799; later, in 1822, after the conquest of Kandy, it was moved to Peradeniya, near Kandy. Supplementing botanical research, in 183437 a “specialist tropical agriculturist,” R.B. Tyler, introduced the so-called “Jamaican methods” of coffee planting in Ceylon. 24 Moreover, new approaches to plantations were developed during the depression of the late 1840s, making the plantation more efficient, economic, and different. Though coffee prices in the 1850s were lower than those in the 1840s, the cost of production had fallen so greatly that “the cost of bringing an acre of land under cultivation would be, in 1857, one tenth of the cost in 1844.” 25 The plantation industry responded to the depression in the world-economy of the late 1840s, emerging economically sound in the 1850s. The most immediate response to the depression, the selling and abandoning of estates, and the

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prohibition on civil servants owning plantations, resulted in a large number of estates changing hands, and producing a new breed of private proprietors. 26 This restructuring demonstrated that these plantations were sizeable economic units well capable of operating within the capitalist world-economy, and suggesting that the Ceylonese economy was well incorporated into it by the 1850s. As expanding incomes increased imports, Ceylon became increasingly dependent on this economy.27 The plantation system gave rise to a whole new class structure which, while somewhat independent of the state, was also capable of dominating it. Since state revenues began to depend on coffee exports, planters emerged as a powerful economic and political force. The establishment of the Chamber of Commerce in 1839 and the Planters Association in 1854 completed the formation of a European land-owning planter capitalist class in Ceylon. In 1855, the mode of appointment of the unofficial European members to the Council was also changed, from nomination to election, elevating the Chamber of Commerce and Planters Association to the level of a constituency for three unofficial European members of the Legislative Council.28 In short, “the problems of the planter came to be regarded as synonymous with those of the country,” 29 and the economy with society.

In sum, as plantations became the central institutions of the new economy, so was Ceylon constructed as a peripheral unit of the capitalist world-economy.

Landscape and Built Form The space produced through these processes consisted of five principal components: first, the locus of the institutions through which capitalism extended its control over the colonial economy--banks, agency houses, trading companies, and shipping companies. The new economic command center where these were located was, in fact, overlain on the older colonial port city, Colombo. Second, the locus of production is the plantation complex, located in the highlands of Ceylon; third, the connection between these, the Colombo-Kandy communication axis.

Finally, there are the sources of labor supply and the communication axes that connected these with the plantations. (figure 3.1) The establishment of coffee plantations transformed the central highlands into the locus of production in Ceylon, a space compatible with the European worldeconomy. Although the plantations spread out over a vast area, it was a centralized system of production compared to forms of Lankan agriculture. Not only were the estates large in scale and centrally controlled, they were also interlinked as a plantation complex supplying the same commodity, coffee, to the same market, through Colombo and London. This new capitalist space was both foreign to Lanka and also largely occupied by foreigners: British planters and superintendents representing absentee landlords and companies and south Indian “coolies.” The “coolies”--a pejorative term for a category of labor in the colonial context--were also produced as part of the colonial capitalist enterprise. Eric Meyer argues that Sinhalese villagers and Tamil plantation workers had, during the coffee era,

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attempted to co-operate with each other, but it was the planter who used separation as a means of control, maintaining a rigid boundary around the plantations and relying on apartheid as a means of social control. In contrast, assimilation was advantageous for the Lankan system, and the villagers continuously contested this separation. 30 Attempts to stop what the planter saw as “encroachments” by the Kandyans led to serious unrest which culminated in a major revolt in 1848. 31 The villagers also invited the Tamils to join the rebellion, even when they launched an attack against a plantation in Matale District.32 The road system, which provided the initial communication infrastructure for the military and political control of Ceylon, helped develop the plantation industry.

The main route between Colombo and Kandy provided the basis for the development of plantations established around Kandy. By 1831, many of the principal towns in the Kandy area were accessible by road. Originally, each planter was compelled to build a road at his own expense linking it to the nearest government road. The coffee boom, however, underestimated expenses and exaggerated returns. 33 The Colombo-Kandy axis, which had represented political rivalry for three centuries, now took on an economic meaning, connecting the plantations with the colonial port and economic command center.

Complementary to the Colombo-Kandy road were the roads from the northwestern ports of Ceylon to the central highlands. Along these the labor force marched from southern India. They were first marched up to the south Indian coast of Rameswaram, where they were placed in a fishing boat, dhoney, to Talaimannar of Ceylon. They then marched another two hundred kilometers or more through the jungle to the estates. These roads meant death for many, with corpses strewn along the sides. 34 According to the estimates of the Colombo Observer, twenty five percent of immigrants died during the period between 1841 to 1849, totaling as many as 70,000 persons.35 Although these estimates were challenged, the graveness of the problem is demonstrated in the debate between the state and the planters as to who was responsible for these deaths. The route was gradually improved with the building of treatment centers--“dignified shacks”--and resting places-ambalams. References suggest that later there were four “hospitals” for “the exclusive use of Malabars,” in Gampola, Kurunegala, Puttalam, and M atale.36 Forming the plantation complex, each estate was organized as a production unit with processing facilities and with the factory and office at the center of the estate.

In regard to the collective consumption of the laborers, the responsibility of the individual estate was minimal but included the distribution of food rations, housing, and a rudimentary school. These few facilities were supplemented by bazaars and temporary shops in nearby villages. 37 From the beginning of the twentieth century, the planters stepped up their attempt to keep the labor force on the estate by opening shops, canteens, and taverns, building more decent lines, dispensaries, temples, sometimes schools, and by allowing the workers to cultivate their own vegetable plots on estate land. 38 According to M eyer, however, the estate was never a selfcontained kingdom where planters could rule, uncontested, over the labor force, since they were neither slaves nor indentured laborers in the conventional sense.39

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Each estate was organized both hierarchically and as a divided settlement, spatially evident in the forms of accommodation and their location. The types of accommodation these estates produced, both for planters and estate laborers, were evolved forms of shelter particular to metropolitan and colonial cultures. Planters’ dwellings, part of a system of accommodation utilized in cash-crop production operated by representatives of British colonial culture, were political- and culturespecific forms known as bungalows.40 These represented the high standard of living of the planter capitalist class, as the owners of coffee--and later tea--plantations, and their representatives. These provided family accommodation with spaces for domestic servants and individual services such as water, sewage, and later, electricity. 41 Individually located on spacious sites, they were built for the conspicuous consumption of space, views, scenery, time, goods, and money.42 Gardens were landscaped with “exotic” plants, employing the same labor of estate workers, particularly that of women and children.

Accommodation provided for so-called “coolies” represented a completely different world; reproduction of labor power took place at a bare minimum.

Accommodation was in “lines,” narrow rows of rooms up to about one hundred yards long and ten feet wide. Each block was divided into approximately 10’x10’ rooms opening onto a common veranda, in each of which lived six to ten people.

Unlike the extensive consumption spaces of the bungalow, lines were mere “shelters” of a purely utilitarian nature, with cooking mostly done outside. Some used the verandah to keep cattle while others enclosed it. “Lines” had no selfprovisioning, and little attention was paid to drainage, ventilation, and privacy.43 W ithout windows and doors, but having a mere opening to enter, rooms were gloomy, dismal, and unhealthy. Maternal and infant mortality rates in plantations lines were far greater than the rest of Ceylon. Most estates did not provide latrines and the laborers developed the habit of defecating on the surface of the soil.

Exceptionally, plantations set apart a block of land in the vicinity of the lines, for them to deposit excreta. Rarely, dwellers provided flimsy envelopes with temporary materials such as jute bagging and cadjan (woven coconut leaves). Such conditions not only accustomed laborers to “unhealthy” habits but, from a metropolitan perspective, encouraged the development of prejudices against plantation workers who were seen as having such habits “naturally.” This created serious impediments to improvements in the general state of sanitation.44 The Reorganization of W orld-Space and the Structures of Knowledge Production The plantations in Ceylon were part of a larger global plantation complex which, during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, were a vital component of the overseas economies of France, the Netherlands, and Great Britain. 45 They were part of a system of raw material production--which also included mines--developed, over three centuries, by European imperial powers across continents.

Although the first successful plantations in Ceylon were established through the

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appropriation of peasant coffee cultivation, the transfer of plants and botanical knowledge directed the kind of cash crop grown. Botanists in Peradeniya Gardens in Kandy experimented with a number of species, including rubber (brought from Brazil in 1876), cinchona (a tree growing wild in the Andes until the 1850s), and indigenous tea.46 The planters were thus in a position to replace the cash crop when, due to a leaf disease, coffee plantations declined in the 1870s. Tea, rubber, and coconut plantations replaced coffee, reproducing the plantation system. Tea displaced coffee in the 1880s, and by 1887, the area under tea had increased to 157,000 acres, and in 1936 there were about 2350 estates.47 Rubber exports expanded following the boom of 1905 produced by the nascent automobile industry. 48 The transfer of plants, particularly in the nineteenth century, was a well organized activity, the political control of which lay in Europe. Expanding the institution of botanical gardens on an imperial scale, Kew Gardens opened up branches throughout the British Empire, including India (1768), Jamaica (1793), and Ceylon (1810). Kew Gardens had become a center for botanical research by 1772 and, in the nineteenth century, established itself as the “command center” for the transfer of economically valuable plants across continents.49 In Ceylon, botanical gardens were established at Peradeniya, Hakgala, Heneratgoda, Anuradhapura, and Badulla.50 In effect, the west Europeans were developing a “whole” new world. The transfer of people and plants are examples of a much larger redistribution and reorganization of the elements of space--also including animals, food types, and diseases--all of which helped to incorporate an extant “natural” environment into a European, “man-made” one. By the last quarter of the nineteenth century webs of long spanning and complex socio-spatial chains were being produced, restructuring world-space. As King puts it, the gardens producing the staple diet of industrial workers in England were located in the Empire, growing tea, sugar, cocoa, and wheat, “voluntarily” imported from the colonies of India, the W est Indies, W est Africa, and Canada; the cotton cloth worn by tea-plantation workers in Assam or Ceylon, “involuntarily” imported from Britain, were manufactured in the mills of Lancashire.51 Just as the transfer of plants, people, and technology, transformed the contents of imperial and world spaces at a material level, so surveying, mapping, cartography, and classification complemented this at a perceptual level. Although Ptolemy’s preoccupation was largely based on religious, cosmic, and mathematical aspects, the renewal of interest in maps in fifteenth century Europe focussed on the appropriation of world-space for secular, military, and commercial purposes.

Crucial here is the west European re-mapping of the world through its homogenization within a single schema, and then the production of new differentiations and nodes within it. Modern cartography perceived the world as an homogenous surface, organized around an equilateral grid of longitudes and latitudes. This representational form erased all other identities and signatures standing in its way, transforming extant space into a tabula rasa. Each place was

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to derive its uniqueness from the coordinates of the colonizers’ grid.

In the nineteenth century, imperial surveying and cartography redefined and renamed places, rivers, and mountains, bringing every corner of the world under its authority. 52 These names, often derived from British places, monarchs, members of the royal family, nobles, and colonial officials were radically different from those of the Ceylonese, which were usually descriptive, for example, Maha Nuwara (the principal city), Ihalagama (upper village), Mahaweli Ganga (sandy river). As Peter Jackson argues, the naming and renaming of places is a crucial aspect of geographical “discovery,” establishing proprietorial claims through association with the colonizing power.53 Space and place were thus relocated within a European cultural sphere.

Yet the conflict between the “systematic mapping of Ceylon” and the use of surveying as a tool to block out land as private property was significant. The colonial social order could neither be confirmed nor extended into so-called virgin territories without the creation of property through the quantification and mapping of space. Demonstrating the significance of surveying, the colonial state established a Survey Department as early as 1801. Yet even in the mid nineteenth century, a significant proportion of geographic information was borrowed from old Dutch maps. Brohier speculates that, in the case of urban areas, the practice of supplementing a title deed with a lot diagram based on its measurements had been started by the Dutch in the 1660s, and keeping a record of every allotment by the state was institutionalized under the new system of tenure introduced in the 1740s.54 As colonial economic, political, and cultural practices brought parts of the world close together, the development of a particular system of knowledge in the W estern core states brought the perception of the world into a single framework of time and space, undermining the cultural and historic worldviews of the “others.” History is cultural, and culture is a process of ordering knowledge; 55 the knowledge on which we are focussing was constructed within the cultural systems that the imperial metropoles were developing. Frank Perlin argues that colonial history was affiliated with European history, and not that of the colonized. 56 European powers have thus colonized the mind in addition to the body. 57 In this process, Eurocentrism presents itself as universalist for it claims that imitation of the W estern model by all peoples is the only solution to the challenges of our time.

Just as flora and fauna in the colonies were forced into European botanical and biological categories, Lanka and the Lankans were relocated into new European temporal and spatial relationships. 58 For Nandy, colonization is “objectification,” and W estern science has built a structure of near-total isolation where human beings themselves--including all their suffering and moral experience--have been objectified as things and processes, to be vivisected, manipulated or corrected.59 For example, colonial officials in Ceylon related the disease parangi (yaws) to a diet which included kurakkan, a dry grain which was the principal product of chena cultivation. This led them to view chena cultivation, widely practiced in the Dry Zone, as senseless and to argue for its replacement by “permanent” wet paddy culture.60

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The west European construction of the “Climatic Other” is of utmost importance to issues of space. According to King, the institution of ‘science,’ especially, ‘tropical medicine’ or ‘tropical architecture,’ comprising ethnoscientific ideas about disease, cultural expectations of health, perceptions of climate and environment, and cultural beliefs and practices regarding various populations in subordinate and superordinate positions.61 W est European geographic categories such as the “tropics” replaced the former Iberian conception of “India,” yet reproduced the large-scale conceptualization of Europe and an homogenous “rest-of-the-world.” The west European “Climatic Other” was, however, a subtle objectification of the subjects referring to more impersonal, material, and scientific factors than the Iberian “Cultural Other” which explicitly referred to their culture and the belief system. This notion was to promote climatic determinism.62 It is within such a framework that London and Liverpool Schools of Tropical Medicine were established in 1899. The new field of “tropical medicine” provided scientific credence to the idea that the tropical world is inherently disease ridden compared to the safer and sanitized temperate world. 63 The diffusion of urban planning and architectural knowledge, particularly constructed for the “Tropical Other,” was undertaken by educational and professional institutions of the metropole. The first paper on “Tropical Architecture” read at RIBA was given in 1869.64 Along with schools of tropical medicine, courses on “tropical architecture” also began in Britain. Later, British Commonwealth membership increased the capacity for post-colonial subjects to travel to the metropole and other dominions for the study of such “tropical architecture.”

The particular imperial conjuncture and the forms of this knowledge have given rise to an international division of labor and authority in the production, legitimation, and circulation of knowledge in which the key centers were located in west European metropoles. Confirming this hierarchical structure of knowledge production and referring to the unevenness it created, M ax W eber notes that “only in the W est does science exist at a stage of development which we recognize to-day as valid.” 65 The structured reality that science proposed implied that alternatives are not possible once such knowledge is established.66 In this singular system of production and distribution of knowledge, the dependency of colonies and the peripheral societies of the capitalist world-economy towards the core-states was affirmed. The development of these all encompassing “regimes of truth” is reflected in the Hegelian belief that the Eastern spirit was static whereas the W estern one was oriented to change and development. Moreover, the broader institutions of science and the monopolization of knowledge production in the metropoles deprived the colonized from deploying particular forms of knowledge as a means of resistance.

A crucial aspect of this argument is the development of economics as a--if not the--central determinant of life, a cultural aspect of capitalist Europe that was

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imposed upon their colonial subordinates. Especially with Adam Smith’s contribution to the notion of the secularization of wealth, economists became the proprietors of progress. W ith progress becoming an irrefutable, universal truth, the primacy of economics would be instrumental in replacing ethics with reason. 67 This ideology equates the well being of a society with its ability to foster “economic development,” an avatar of the “industrial revolution.” “Economic development” thus not only “scientifically” propagates the particular historical path taken by W estern industrialized states as the common destiny of each individual nation, but also measures the social well being of the society by its capacity to progress in this direction. This has become a central theme in urban development and planning.

Along with a world history, the British authorities reconfigured Ceylonese history, including the rewriting of Lankan history from a secular and outsider’s point of view. The “empire-builders” from the British upper classes were educated and patronizing, carrying with them their patronizing attitude towards the people of their own country. The first scholars to approach the great chronicle, Mahawamsa, from such a position were colonial writers such as James Cordiner, Robert Percival, Anthony Bertolacci, and John Davy who refused to accept the possibility of a Lankan historiography that was not myth or fable. Commenting on some of the oldest historical literature in south Asia, Davy did not hesitate to assert that the Sinhalese do not possess an accurate record of events; they were ignorant of genuine history, and not sufficiently advanced to relish it. 68 Instead, what the Sinhalese have are legendary tales.69 The first modern compilation of Sri Lankan Tamil history, the Yalpana Vaipava-Malai, was also written in 1736 at the initiative of a Dutch official administering Jaffna. 70 One after the other, British writers continued to re-write Lankan history, including the translation of ancient chronicles such as the Mahawamsa and Culawamsa from Pali, so that the Ceylonese, once the cultural capacity to use English had been acquired, could read this new history in English.

The Production of Colonial Subjects Although colonial society in Ceylon was, at first, unfamiliar to the Lankans, education provided the means to familiarize this society and space to them and transform themselves into its subjects. W hat the colonial state had to accomplish was to provide the means whereby the Ceylonese could understand what these social structures, spaces, and symbols meant and to recognize their subordinate position within these. As the main means of producing such subjects, the Commission recommended that a system of education “should be held out to natives whereby they may in time qualify themselves for holding some of the appointments.” 71 This would both facilitate the employment of Ceylonese in the English-speaking administration as well as make the colonial language an agent of social mobility. The requirement that the unofficial members of the Legislative Council, appointed by the Governor, speak English, made English education a necessity to become a “politician” within the colonial governmental system.

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English was established as the language of the government, the medium of courts, trade, and commerce.72 In order to facilitate the circulation of British knowledge in Ceylon, five English schools were established in the early 1830s. At the same time the government sponsorship for the Sinhalese and Tamil schools was abolished. 73 By 1835 there were 235 Protestant schools, 90 government-controlled schools, and about 100 Catholic schools. The urban structure of Ceylon, constructed through Provincial and District capitals, provided the necessary infrastructure for the organization of the colonial educational system. English schools were built at Colombo, Galle, Kandy, Jaffna, and Chilaw. Since the emphasis was now placed on these leading schools, the centers of education moved from the villages to towns. Completing the educational system, the state established the Colombo Academy (later Royal College), in 1836, and introduced Cambridge University examinations in Ceylon in 1880. Both their location and the curriculum reinforced the process of urbanization, from rural schools to the main English ones, and then, to Cambridge University.

As Frantz Fanon has argued, “colonialism tended not only to deprive a society of its freedom and wealth, but of its very character, leaving its people intellectually and morally disoriented.” 74 Institutions such as education and religion provided the opportunity for these disoriented “natives” to transform themselves into subjects of the new colonial society and space. It was more the establishment of this British cultural and knowledge hegemony that created the colonial society and space of Ceylon, and particularly, the durability of its urban spatial structures, than the mere installment of a colonial administration.

The Landscape of Colonial Institutions As the communication system and its related urban structure provided the basis for the development of a plantation based economy, they were also incorporated into this economy. The increase of state revenues from the expanding coffee industry, with the state re-investing part of this revenue in the physical infrastructure --including the building and repairing of roads and irrigation works--produced a major building boom in the 1870s and 1880s, particularly in Colombo. 75 Kandy became the headquarters of the main planting interests, and the most developed town after Colombo. Jaffna and Galle grew as regional centers in northern and southern Ceylon. This exemplifies the reinforcement and expansion of the extant urban network, adding a broad international and regional significance to it.

Profitable plantations and the expanding economy attracted financial and service industries, consisting of banks, insurance companies, and agency houses, and which carried out the management and business functions of the estates. By the 1870s, especially with the increase in the size of vessels, the expansion of the harbor had made Colombo by far the most prominent port in Ceylon. Colombo’s growing

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FIGURE 3.2 Clapham Junction of the East: Colombo’s centrality in 1900.

From: Philip, ed., 52-53. centrality, especially with the introduction of railways and telegraphs, undermined the competitiveness of Galle.

Colombo was always much more than just the capital of Ceylon. The many institutions and the size of their operations, as well as the buildings that Colombo contained, were far greater than what the capital of Ceylon required. As early twentieth century maps demonstrate, Colombo was centrally located on major world shipping lines with links to Albany (Australia), Penang (Malaya), Rangoon (Burma), Mauritius, and Aden. (figure 3.2) According to Dharmasena, Colombo stood on three major routes: from Europe to Madras via Cape Town; to the Coromandel coast and Calcutta; and to Bombay and the Far East.76 This was complemented by the development of Colombo harbor as a coaling station and a calling port in Asia, particularly for vessels plying between Britain and Australia.77 At the turn of the century Colombo was known as “the Clapham Junction of the East.” 78 Henry W . Cave described it as “a spot on which converge the steamships of all nations for coal and the exchange of freight and passengers.” 79 The harbor was expanded in 1874 to accommodate fifty steamers and a breakwater was constructed, at a colossal cost of £2½ million.80 This had a significant impact on Colombo’s landscape. By the 1890s, the docks had become one of the most significant places in the city. Outside the port, the expanding labor force transformed the area north of the fort (especially Kochchikade) into one of the first urban working class settlements.

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These transformations redefined Colombo’s role, reinforcing its position within the imperial urban system. The city seems to have grown into an “international” financial center during the late nineteenth century. Its new economic role was evident in the establishment of the First Bank of Ceylon (1841), the Mercantile Bank of India (1854), The Bank of Madras (1867), The National Bank of India (1881), the Chartered Bank of India, London and Australia (1892), and the Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation (1902). A decimal system of currency was also established in 1872, and gold was made legal tender at Rs.15 (Rupees) a sovereign. These financial institutions laid the foundations for what a century later would be Colombo’s attempt to become a major financial center in south and southeast Asia.

W ith the addition of these banks and other institutional buildings, the landscape of Colombo was radically transformed. Hotels were built to accommodate the increasing numbers of visitors and tourists. There were three major hotels during this time: Grand Oriental, Bristol Hotel, and Galle Face Hotel, which was rebuilt in a Renaissance style in 1894. Along with the commercial and financial institutions, state institutions also expanded: a Municipal Council in 1865 for the administration of the city and the construction of a M unicipal Council building in 1873. 81 The morphogenesis that Colombo was undergoing was characterized by the interrelated processes of the outward expansion of Colombo--into areas such as Cinnamon Gardens--and the restructuring of the older areas--particularly the fort area--transforming them into parts of this new and larger Colombo. The impressive scale of this development is indicated in the description of the Cave Building: “Quite close to the lighthouse is a fine building occupying the corner of Upper Chatham and Queen Streets with a frontage of four hundred feet.” 82 By the end of the century most former Dutch buildings had already disappeared “giving place to colossal houses of business befitting the dignity of the port.” 83 The extent of early twentieth century Colombo, the scale of its harbor, and its spectacular buildings and architecture only make sense when seen as those of a major node in the larger imperial urban system. It was this critical role within the larger Empire which boosted its development, not least, its architectural and spatial provisions, planned in relation to London and Perth, Calcutta and Cape Town, but not in relation to Kandy, Anuradhapura or any place in the interior of Ceylon.

At the same time, however, Colombo’s role as the economic, political, and communication center of Ceylon also became well established. The introduction of the railways in the 1860s reinforced this communication network, at the same time destroying the Sinhalese monopoly in transportation, where 79,000 carts traveled between Colombo and Kandy annually. The Sinhalese largely used bullock carts, double-bullock carts and single-bullock hackeries, which took six to eight days either way in the 1850s. The trains took only four and a half hours. If speed, tight scheduling, as well as organized procedure for loading, unloading, refueling, and maintenance justified the cost of steamers in international transportation, the same factors justified railways within Ceylon. The dominance of the planter’s

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needs is also evident in the spatial layout of the railways. The first railway line, between Colombo and Kandy, was extended further into the highlands in the 1870s and 1880s, linking more remote coffee and tea plantation areas with Colombo and serving the hill station at Nuwara Eliya. Subsequently, the extension of railways to Mannar, and connecting it with the south Indian Tuticorin line (opened in 1875) by a ferry service, provided a more reliable form of transportation of labor for the plantations. 84 Railways, telegraph, and other means of communication radiating from Colombo connected all principal towns within Ceylon to Colombo in the first instance, but then to the major commodity exchanges of the world--M anchester, Liverpool, London, and Paris. In 1858, a mere four years after the laying of a telegraph line between Calcutta and Bombay, the line was extended to Ceylon. By the early twentieth century, Ceylon had highly organized postal, telegraph, and telephone services with over a hundred call offices and 25,000 miles of telephone wire for subscribers, most of whom were in Colombo. 85 Affluence, particularly manifested in the late nineteenth century major construction boom, gave rise to a range of new institutions and spaces. There was not only a rapid expansion of leisure buildings in terms of resorts and spas but also the intervention of new building forms and leisure environments, whether the seafront promenade, winter gardens, or specialized vacation house. 86 In the colonies, however, labor was cheap, more resources were available, and the members of the colonial community were more powerful in carrying out their aspirations than their compatriots in the metropole. The leisure and conspicuous consumption, therefore, extended to a wider group of colonial officials. The Nuwara Eliya hill station and the suburb of Cinnamon Gardens provide two good examples of this.

The development of Nuwara Eliya as a European resort was begun by the Governor, Edward Barnes, who visited the area in 1827 and built a house there for “summer” use. Nuwara Eliya soon attracted the attention of the colonial community which soon transformed it into a hill station. King argues that these highland settlements resulted from a particular set of environmental preferences, demonstrating the distinctive residential models available for the colonial community; they are also explained by the particular ethno-medical theories supporting the view that hill stations were healthier than residence on the plains. 87 W ith the increase in the income of the state, and from plantations, especially from the mid-nineteenth century, these pursuits began to be viewed as a regular aspect of social life by the broader colonial community. Hence, the hill station of Nuwara Eliya represents both the growing affluence of the colonial system and the socialization of its benefits to a larger segment of the colonial community.

In addition to a healthy environment, the hill station was also a place that replicated both the social and physical environments of “home.” The extensive plateau of Nuwara Eliya, encircled by hills, was therefore transformed into a proto“Lake District” with two lakes, a race-course, two golf links, public gardens, and several hotels. 88 Urwick, who visited Nuwara Eliya in the late 1870s, commented

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that “Here one seems to get into England again; English-looking cottages, with gardens full of English flowers, fruit trees, and vegetables; oaks and firs, green fields and hedges, robins and black-birds, bracing breezes and crisp, frosty nights.” 89 Although the “ice” that could complete the ambience was absent, the piercing cold wind frequently complained of in England was never felt, and the temperature in Nuwara Eliya never approached what is called “tropical heat.” 90 In short, for the B ritish, Nuwara Eliya was the Buxton of Ceylon, its greatest sanatorium.

Emphasizing the high level of consumption, houses were located on spacious sites, near culturally significant physical features such as lakes and woods, and usually providing residents with long range views of valleys and mountain ranges. (figure 3.3) The multiplicity of house forms reflected the Victorian preference for variety. 91 The principal house form, however, was a modified form of bungalow, with reduced veranda space and corrugated iron roofing, a compromise between an English cottage and a colonial bungalow adapted to the environmental and cultural conditions of the place. Nuwara Eliya thus reflected a “little England,” but within a colonial context. Hidden behind the “English looking facades,” were the comforts of the spatially differentiated domestic architecture of the colonial community, with specialized spaces for sleeping and eating, private and social functions, all maintained by the availability of servants.

In order to facilitate leisure based travel, the British also introduced the institution of the “rest house.” Due to the absence of culturally appropriate overnight resting places in Ceylon, in the early nineteenth century the houses of

FIGURE 3.3 Space in time: Nuwara Eliya hill station.

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colonial officials had been used as places of “public entertainment” for travelers. 92 This function was gradually taken over by rest houses constructed by the Department of Public W orks, particularly for the use of civil servants. Turner wrote in the 1920s, “Ceylon is singularly fortunate in possessing 175 rest houses.” 93 Built of stone, roofed with tiles, these were organized around rooms with specialized functions and the services of servants.

These provided both food and accommodation at rates subsidized by the colonial state.

W hat this replaced was the former Lankan institution of Ambalama, the resting place for travelers, usually built along roads. Apparently there were ambalams in every village and they appeared more frequently along main roads. This was usually an open structure consisting of a roof on four columns with a square ground plan and elevated seating spaces. Elaborate ones had more columns and provisions to use temporary cloth partitions for privacy. Travelers were expected to bring utensils to cook. Unlike in rest houses, the users were not provided with food, but with firewood, water, and, sometimes, a knife. Ambalams were also used as a meeting place, both formal and informal, by the villagers. Another set of more elaborate “rest houses,” madamas, supplied visitors with food and firewood.94 These new spaces of resorts, hill stations, and rest houses, were developed within a new metropolitan perception of time. The division of the day between “work” and “leisure” and the year between “work” and “vacation” was part of the emergent culture of west European industrial societies. It was a culture based upon the task-oriented organization of the individual’s time, replacing a distribution of time organized to suit other “natural” compulsions, such as weather patterns, and social and cultural obligations, such as participating in religious festivals, marriages, and funerals. In contrast, colonial time is part of a larger, “industrial” organization of time within fiscal years, work days and holidays, weeks and weekends, and the organization of life around European-Christian notions of time. 95 Places such as Nuwara Eliya and Cinnamon Gardens (discussed below) from the fort area or the plantations represent the spatial constitution of this structured time, particularly, the separation of both “everyday life” and “recreation” from “work.”

The impressive clock tower that stood at the center of the fort was a permanent reminder of the triumph of this new colonial time, space, and culture in Ceylon.

Carlo Cipolla argues that soon after its appearance in Europe, the clock assumed the role of a status symbol. Towns competed with one another in the construction of the most lavish clocks and many of these municipal time pieces possessed elaborate movements and dials whose meaning only a few could understand. 96 In Colombo, the lavish design of the clock tower, combined with a lighthouse, by the wife of Governor Henry W ard (1855-60), was given a commanding presence by its prominent location at the principal intersection between King’s Street and Chatham Street. (figure 3.4) If Europe was influenced by the clock tower while using it, in Colombo, it stood as a reminder and symbol of the new capitalist and industrial temporal discipline imposed upon the society.

Separating work and residential spaces, the colonial elite also created the urban residential space of the suburb. In the late seventeenth century, high ranking Dutch

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officials preferred to live outside the city, for example, just north of the Oude Stad, in Hultsdorf and Grandpass.

As the Dutch had insufficient political authority, these houses were located in protected areas and poor economic conditions limited these luxuries to a few high ranking officials. (figure 2.5) These Dutch houses were, therefore, more comparable to the country houses or villas of a European elite, designed for their owner’s enjoyment and relaxation, than a suburban dwelling type.

The British Governor’s country lodge at San Sebastian, “situated very prettily on a freshwater lake, that neatly insulates the fort, of which there is a pleasing view,“ 97 also belonged to this category. As with the hill station, this luxury began to be expected by a larger group of colonial officials and were institutionalized as a regular aspect of urban life in the late nineteenth FIGURE 3.4 The triumph of Colonial time: Chatham Street clock tower, Colombo, 1850s. century.

Cinnamon Gardens represents a greater socialization of residential living away from work giving rise to a form of proto-rural living within the urban, but only when it had become economically feasible and politically viable. The early location of colonial residences was governed by functional needs, such as the proximity to the port and warehouses and security. By the mid-nineteenth century, members of the colonial community neither needed nor wished to live in the fort area and the prevalent ethno-medical ideas also favored spacious low-density layouts. The disappearance of the need for high security is evident in the dismantling of the fort in 1869. Moreover, the limitations in transport and communication had also been reduced. The introduction of man-pulled vehicles, especially the jingrickshaw from Hong Kong in 1884, not only provided transportation for the increasingly affluent colonial community, but also the imagery of social power that they enjoyed.98 (figure 3.5) The construction of Cinnamon Gardens represented the first large scale expansion of the city, for its authorities, as well as the shift of the elite from the city center to its outskirts.

As with the Nuwara Eliya hill station and the Galle Face promenade, here too the colonial regime was able to make use of a “no man’s” land, at Cinnamon

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FIGURE 3.5 The aura of power: Bungalows of Cinnamon Gardens and the private rickshaw in the 1890s. From: Cave, 67; Ferguson, 107.

Gardens. In a situation where the contestations of the indigenous inhabitants were minimal, it is likely that there was not much of a difference between the conceptualized form of the settlement and its final materialized form. It was initiated with the laying out of spacious park and flower gardens as the focus,

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naming it after the British Empress, Victoria, and by selling the land around for residential building. 99 Further familiarizing the settlement for the colonial community, the area around it was laid out as a system of radial streets named after British Governors of Ceylon, for example, Horton Place, Torrington Place, and Cameron Place, and leading to the circular road around the park, with its crescents, the names of which recalled members of the royal family, Edinburgh, Albert, and Guildford Crescents crossing the radials. The streets were planted with a row of trees on either side, and in some cases, along the center such that they resembled boulevards, as for example, with Green Path, traversing Victoria Park. (figure 3.6) The layout of Cinnamon Gardens demonstrates a particular set of social and aesthetic beliefs that begin to value country living in the context of rapidly industrializing cities in the metropole. The dominance of the garden city movement in the ideological and cultural context of British planning in the first half of the twentieth century is well known. Although Colombo, unlike most nineteenth century metropolitan cities, was neither an industrial city nor polluted, the planned suburb as a specialized urban residential area was laid out as early as the late nineteenth century. Yet the form of Cinnamon Gardens does not represent the ideals of the romanticism but was laid out according to a strict geometry. If urban densities in the fort limited private gardens to the rear, in Cinnamon Gardens the practice was to have a garden all round, with various functions assigned to them.

Bungalows were laid out in spacious sites of about an acre, a complete reversal of the early colonial urban landscapes that Percival described as having a “compact appearance to which we are accustomed.” 100 The restructuring of Colombo in the 1860s was not limited to the construction of Cinnamon Gardens. The open field of fire to the south of the fort--controlled by the military--was transformed into a seaside promenade, Galle Face. This open lawn of about one mile long and three hundred yards wide is located between the sea and Beira Lake on the west and the east, with the fort area and the 180-room Galle Face Hotel (1894) to the north and south. The disbandment of the Ceylon Rifles Regiments between 1869 and 1871 opened up Slave Island, where the British stationed these, mostly Malay, regiments. The freed-up military bands were used to provide entertainment at Galle Face and Victoria Park, creating a symbolic space which embodied “British dignity, culture, and power.” From 1887, the English cricket team played a test match on their tours to Australia at Galle Face.101 The political and economic authorities of the colony, however, continued to be located in the Fort area, but now a place without fortifications. Concurrently, Pettah was transformed into the “national” center of communication, with the central rail and bus stations, from which railway and bus lines radiated, as well as the locus of wholesale activity. The separation of elite residences in Cinnamon Gardens, and other developments such as the building of a promenade skirting the sea front in Galle Face, not only spread out the social and economic functions of Colombo in the 1860s, but also specialized them into functionally defined zones, although “zoning” was yet to be introduced as a formal urban planning tool.

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Nonetheless, the larger Colombo area also reproduced the space of the colonial cultural groups that were formerly located within the fort. By the early twentieth century Cinnamon Gardens was growing into a second center of colonial power, reproducing the divided city at a larger scale. This is manifest in the establishment of British cultural institutions, such as the civil hospital and medical school, museum, library, the Municipal Council theater, and later, the Council building in Cinnamon Gardens. The cultural institutions of Cinnamon Gardens included an Anglican church, cricket pitch, a (Havelock) race course, (Ridgeway) golf links, and clubs (Garden Club and Prince’s Club). 102 The colonial community’s desire to secure colonial cultural space is most evident in working within and outside the Legislative Council to defeat a government proposal to construct railways to the south of Ceylon across either Galle Face or Cinnamon Gardens. 103 Unlike their attitude towards the fort in the early part of the nineteenth century, the British did not prevent non-British inhabitants from moving into Cinnamon Gardens. The selection was largely effected through the real estate market and restricting the membership of their prime cultural clubs, in which the “colored” and “blacks” were debarred from membership. 104 Homogenization of the Built Environment In many respects, the construction of the new built environment and culture in Ceylon operated at the “international” level of the British Empire, linking the imperial metropole and the colonies. Carrying over the monopoly of the colonial regime, the Public W orks Department institutionalized the distinct ways in which the “official” built culture of Ceylon was to be produced. As a department of the colonial state, the Public W orks Department was simultaneously a constituent element of the larger administrative structure that held the Empire together. 105 The buildings produced by colonial state agencies across the Empire provided more of a uniformity, representing these as belonging to a single social and cultural system. 106 (figure 3.7) As Gwendolyn W right suggests in relation to the French Empire, if differences in architecture reflected the cultural and geographical differences of the colonies, the uniformity that was particularly prevalent in the most prestigious buildings demonstrated that they belonged to the larger architectural space of the British Empire.107 Officials in the Public W orks Department and the colonial community did not replicate the metropolitan culture and built forms, but ones which were specifically modified according to climatic, resource, cultural, environmental, and other conditions and constraints in particular colonial situations.108 This is where the concept of “colonial third culture” becomes valuable, as the official colonial built environment is built as part of this culture. King has defined this as, “the European colonial culture which resulted from the transformation of metropolitan cultural institutions as they came into contact with the culture of the indigenous society.” 109 That the colonial community had shown the greatest commitment to the export of grand styles of metropolitan architecture to Ceylon with little adaptation is

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FIGURE 3.7 The imperial landscape: Colombo Town Hall (1920s), the Parliament and Secretariat (1930s), General Post Office (1850s).

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particularly evident in two periods: from the 1830s up to about the 1860s, and again in the 1910s through 1930s.

It was, therefore, a part of a larger imperial landscape which replaced the former Lankan built environments, and which had been organized within several kingdoms.

The process of production and circulation of architectural ideas was also transformed, from one of appropriation, to appropriation and diffusion. Focussing on historic Lankan roofs, Bandaranayake has argued that the forms of historic religio-royal buildings were largely rooted in the organic traditions of the village.110 Yet the social stratification of the built environment was constructed by preventing the dissemination and emulation of the “official architecture,” this way protecting the visibility of the uppermost strata by monopolizing these built forms by social and legal means. In regard to the larger imperial built environment, King has demonstrated the appropriation of a Bengali peasant house form by the British to construct the particular colonial bungalow form, and re-circulating it as an appropriate cultural form over different parts of the Empire.111 The export of built forms from the metropoles to the colonies did not take a linear, or uniform, but rather a varied trajectory. Here I would identify four different stages, albeit not contiguous or exclusive, nor progressive, but representing different colonial attitudes towards the built environment. In the early stages of colonialism, as Thomas Metcalf has observed in regard to India, the British did not pay much attention to “architecture,” 112 neither British nor Lankan.

During this period, up to the 1830s, the principal objective of the colonial regime was the conquest of Ceylon--ruled by the Dutch--and Kandy. Although the British required particular forms of accommodation they were more concerned with their function than with their symbolism. Functions also included crude symbolism such as building the Kadugannawa tunnel, which highlighted a “technological superiority,” but not “high style” architecture. Hence, after the appropriation of Ceylon in 1796, the British seem to have been content with adopting Dutch buildings in Colombo, as well as their forms of defense, including the fort, with little modification. Similarly, with the appropriation of Kandy in 1815, they began adapting Kandyan buildings, as discussed in Chapter Two. After the subjection of Kandy, the colonial regime embarked on a practice of aggressively following metropolitan institutions and building forms as models, stamping their authority on the built environment. This is evident in the King’s pavilion and St. Paul’s church built in metropolitan/colonial architectural styles in Kandy. This trend was slow but steady until the 1870s. The buildings erected during the building booms of the 1870s and 1880s were largely of metropolitan origin. Representing the political authority and economic prosperity of the period, and so-called Victorian taste, the building types and forms varied. These include the G eorgian and arcaded General Post Office, the cast iron Fort railway station, and the Gothic town hall built in 1873 in Pettah.

In regard to India, Evenson argues that, from the 1860s, the British became the self-appointed guardians of Indian civilization. 113 Yet the simultaneous need for the symbolic elaboration of colonial buildings created conditions for the use of some

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decorative elements from Mogul buildings, giving rise to what was called an “IndoSaracenic” style in India between the 1860s and 1910s. 114 Attempts to appropriate “native aesthetics” can also be seen in other European empires during this period, for example the French Empire, 115 suggesting similarities of trajectories.

During the period in which the European colonizers’ attention was attracted by the mysteries and marvels of the colonized, there is enough evidence to believe that British attention in Ceylon was drawn more towards the historic irrigation works.

The example of the ruined tanks and canals in the so-called dry zone, some of which were about two-thousand years old, presented a challenge to the British who, in their perception, belonged to a nation with unbound confidence in its technological abilities. They also provided a powerful motive as the restoration of irrigation works would bring credit to the government in the eyes of local people. 116 This is demonstrated by the creation of the Archaeology Department in 1890 and Irrigation Department in 1900. It is important to notice that all the departments significant for the conquest and administration of the territory were established within a few years after the takeover of Colombo, but the departments necessary for the restoration or studying of Lankan historic structures were only created in the late nineteenth century. Also reflecting specific cultural developments in the metropole, the British established the Kandyan Arts and Crafts Association in the 1880s to protect and encourage Kandyan arts and crafts.

Associated with these reservoirs and colossal buildings and stupas, the historic Raja Rata civilization became a focus of study and institutions were created to deal with what was increasingly being represented as the “Other” culture. By then Lankan culture was a dead force for the British, and their interest turned to preserving artifacts of a past, and a culture that is “different.” Most exemplary is the construction of a museum in 1877,117 its “Georgian” style symbolically framing the appropriation of one culture by the dominant other. This building, the aim of which was to “store” Lankan historic culture, was the most prominent building in Cinnamon Gardens until the grand Municipal Council building was built in the 1920s. Behind the Georgian facade of the M useum was a central hall displaying brass and ivory, galleries for Ceylonese products; natural history; rocks, minerals, and gems; indigenous birds, fishes, and insects; and archaeological rooms, all displayed within this single building in the Cinnamon Gardens.

Around 1910, following the rubber boom, another group of buildings sprang up.

By the 1920s, the British had begun to build in a more grandiose neoclassical style prevalent in the metropole. The most notable examples are the new Secretariat and Parliament (council chambers) and the town hall of the 1920s. This return to metropolitan high styles demonstrated a more rigorous projection of the image of the Empire, not least evident in the location of these buildings; the Parliament house in the Fort area and the Municipal Council building in Cinnamon Gardens. This trend can be seen as a response to the increasing indigenous resistance to capitalism and colonialism. As in Duncan’s example of Kandy, prior to the British takeover,118 the last phases of British rule were also marked by an aggressive policy of monumental building.

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Yet the Parliament house also represented universal suffrage, introduced in 1931. The assembly was built to accommodate 49 representatives--with room for expansion without structural changes. This building therefore also represented the introduction of democracy, a Western way of decision making at “national” level by its colonial authorities. It is therefore somewhat ironic that this building, representing a nascent Ceylonese democracy, was built as a statement of British imperial power, and in a high style of W estern architecture.

In these three chapters, I have addressed issues concerning the Europeancolonial construction of space at variety of scales--world-spaces, regional spaces, territorial spaces, urban systems, landscapes, and interiors. I have argued that European colonialism is not merely a political, social, and economic process, but also a spatial and cultural enterprise. I have also aimed to demonstrate how social and cultural institutions and the architecture, built environment, and urban form, which contain and represent them, symbolize the height of colonialism in the late nineteenth century. In my next three chapters, I shall focus on the Ceylonese and Sri Lankan responses to these spaces and environments.

Notes 1. Wallerstein, The Modern World-System III, 130, 137.

2. Young, White Mythologies, 119.

3. G.C. Mendis. The Colbrooke-Cameron Papers. Documents on British Colonial Policy in Ceylon, 1796-1831. 2 vols. (London: Oxford University Press, 1956), 190.

4. Tennent, II: 229, 231; Asoka Bandarage, Colonialism in Sri Lanka: The Political Economy of the Kandyan Highlands 1833-1886 (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1983), 72; Mills, Ceylon Under British Rule, 227-8; I.H. van den Driesen, Some Aspects of History of the Coffee Industry in Ceylon With Special Reference to the Period, 1832-1885 (PhD. diss.

University of London, 1954), 41.

5. Tennent, II: 235; Mills, Ceylon Under British Rule, 228-9.

6. Tennent, II: 229. Italics mine.

7. For N.D. Kondratieff, 1844 to 1851 was the end of a long wave of economic life that began in the 1790s. (“The Long Waves in Economic Life,” Review II (1979): 535) 8. Mills, Ceylon Under British Rule, 222; Bandarage, 231, 63; de Silva, A History of Sri Lanka, 227.

9. Bandarage, 94; de Silva, Ceylon Under the British Occupation, II: 372; Ralph Pieris, Singhalese Social Organization: The Kandy Period (Colombo: Ceylon University Press Board, 1956), 41-2; Brohier, Lands, Maps and Surveys, 5; University of Ceylon, The Disintegrating Village. Report of a Socio-Economic Survey Conducted by the University of Ceylon [at Pata Dumbara] (The Ceylon University Press Board, 1957), xi-xii.

10. Bandarage, 87-97; Mick Moore, The State and Peasant Policies in Sri Lanka (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 31.

11. Bandarage, 231. See the list George Akland presented in his evidence before the Parliamentary Committee on Ceylon in 1850, in de Silva, ed., Social Policy and Missionary Organizations, 297.

12. de Silva, Ceylon Under the British, I: 291; Ibid, II: 582; Bandarage, 63, 74; Mills, Ceylon Under British Rule, 230; van den Driesen, 43; Donald Snodgras, Ceylon: An Export Economy in Transition (Homewood, Il: Richmond D. Irwin, 1966), 26.

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13. Snodgras, 26.

14. Speculum, Ceylon: Her Present Condition, Revenues, Taxes and Expenditure (Colombo: Observer Press, 1868), 5-12.

15. Bandarage, 179. See also, Mills, Ceylon Under British Rule, 21.

16. Mills, Ceylon Under British Rule, 19-21.

17. Pieris, Singhalese Social Organization, 95. See also Knox, An Historical Account of Ceylon, 68-9.

18. Pieris, Singhalese Social Organization, 97. Rajakariya was largely a Singhalese system and similar systems such as Uliyam existed in Jaffna. (de Silva, A History of Sri Lanka, 213-5) 19. de Silva, Ceylon Under the British, I: 209; Mills, Ceylon Under British Rule, 20-1.

20. Mills, Ceylon Under British Rule, 73-4.

21. In Bandarage, 191. The unreliability of indigenes for the capitalist enterprises was not peculiar to the Singhalese. (See, W. Kloosterboer, Since the Abolition of Slavery: A Survey of Compulsory Labor Through the World (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1960), 44; R.M.A. van Zwanenberg, Colonial Capitalism and Labor in Kenya: 1919-1939 (Nairobi: East African Publication Bureau, 1975), 73) 22. B.H. Farmer, Pioneer Peasant Colonization in Ceylon: A Study in Asian Agrarian Problems (London: Oxford university Press, 1957), 283.

23. I. H. van den Driesen, Indian Plantation Labor in Sri Lanka: Aspects of the History of Immigration in the Nineteenth Century (University of Western Australia: Center for South and Southeast Asian Studies, 1982), 6; de Silva, Social Policy and Missionary Organizations, 259, 274; Eric Meyer, “Aspects of the Singhalese-Tamil Relations in the Plantation Areas of Sri Lanka Under the British Raj,� The Indian economic and Social History Review 27 (1990): 170; L.J.B. Turner, Handbook of Commercial and General Information for Ceylon (Colombo: Government Printer, 1927), 25; J.C. Willis, Agriculture in the Tropics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1909), 20).

24. Mills, Ceylon Under British Rule, 226-7, 237-8; Tennent, II: 209 25. Tennent, II: 232-3; Mills, Ceylon Under British Rule, 227 26. Bandarage, 81, 214; Mills, Ceylon Under British, 77-8; Speculum, 6; Tennent, II: 232-3.

27. See Michael Havinden and David Meredith, Colonialism and Development: Britain and its Tropical Colonies, 1850-1960 (London: Routledge, 1993), 63, 94.

28. Mills, Ceylon Under British Rule, 112.

29. Bandarage, 236.

30. Meyer, 170.

31. C.A. Bayly, Imperial Meridian: The British Empire and the World 1780-1830 (London: Longman, 1989), 240.

32. See Meyer, 170.

33. See Mills, Ceylon Under British Rule, 225, 230.

34. See van den Driesen, Indian Plantation Labor, 11.

35. In Frank Heidmann, Kanganies in Sri Lanka and Malaysia: The Tamil RecruiterCum-Foreman as a Sociological Category in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Century (Munchen: ANACON, 1992), 13.

36. Van den Driesen, Indian Plantation Labor, 10, 11, 14. According to P.D. Millie, more deaths took place after arrival on the estates, many being worn with the journey and changes of climate. (Thirty Years Ago or Reminiscences of the Early Days of Coffee Planting in Ceylon (Colombo ,1878) See also Soma Hewa, Colonialism, Tropical Disease and Imperial Medicine: Rockefeller Philanthophy in Sri Lanka (Lanham, MD: University Press

Incorporating Ceylon

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of America, 1995), 39.

37. Meyer, 175.

38. Dharmapriya Wesumperuma, Indian Immigrant Plantation Workers in Sri Lanka: A Historical Perspective, 1880-1910 (Colombo: Vidyalankara Press, 1986), Chapter vii.

39. Meyer, 187.

40. See Anthony D. King, The Bungalow: The Production of A global Culture. 2nd ed.

(New York: Oxford University Press, 1995).

41. See Marga, Housing Development in Sri Lanka 1971-81 (Colombo: Marga Institute, 1986), 76.

42. See King, Urbanism, Colonialism and the World-Economy, 120.

43. Wesumperuma, 232; Van den Driesen, Indian Plantation Labor, 12, 55.

44. Wesumperuma, 233-4.

45. Philip D. Curtin, The Rise and Fall of the Plantation Complex: Essays in Atlantic History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), ix, 204.

46. Daniel R. Headrick, The Tentacles of Progress: Technology Transfer in the Age of Imperialism 1850-1940 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 213, 232, 235. See also Willis, 104; Ferguson, Ceylon in 1903, 70.

47. Willis, 59; Bandarage, 14; Alan Pim, Colonial Agricultural Production: The Contribution Made by Native Peasants and by Foreign Enterprise (London: Oxford University Press, 1946), 62.

48. Headrick, 243.

49. Headrick, 212-3.

50. Mendis, Ceylon Under the British, 100.

51. King, Colonialism, Urbanism and the World-Economy, 132.

52. Christopher, The British Empire at its Zenith.

53. Peter Jackson, Maps of Meaning: An Introduction to Cultural Geography (London: Unwin Hyman, 1989), 168.

54. Land sales credit earned by the Department peaked in 1873, amounting to £133,500.

(Brohier, Lands, Maps and Surveys, I: 59) 55. See James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), 235.

56. Frank Perlin, “Precolonial South Asia and Western Penetration in the Seventeenth to Nineteenth Centuries: A Problem of Epistemological Status,” Review iv (Fall 1980): 284.

57. See Ashis Nandy, The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self under Colonialism.

New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1994 [1983], xi.

58. See Anthony Pagden, European Encounters with the New World: From Renaissance to Romanticism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 10) for a similar argument in regard to the “New World.”

59. Nandy, Traditions, Tyranny, and Utopias, 106, 107.

60. Michael Roberts, “Irrigation Policy in British Ceylon During the Nineteenth Century,” South Asia 2 (1972): 52.

61. King, Colonialism, Urbanism and the World-Economy, 34.

62. A standard geography text book used in Britain in the early twentieth century spells out this concept well: 1. The temperate zones are the most desirable regions of the earth. They have produced the highest types of mankind, and within them alone can the white man live comfortably and work effectively. There a man is encouraged to labour; for the heat is not so great as to sap his energy, and the cold is not so intense as to numb his powers.

2. The savage in the tropical forest has but to put out his hand to find sufficient food to

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keep him alive. Nature is most bountiful, and the balmy skies make clothing and shelter almost unnecessary. In the temperate zones, however, a man must work to live. He must make clothes to wear and build a roof for shelter. He must clear and till the land before he can secure a steady, regular livelihood.

3. His harvest comes but once a year, so that he must learn to deny himself and lay by something for the future. He discovers that in concert with others he can do many things which are impossible to his unaided strength. He thus learns to unite into clans, tribes, and states. In this and in many other ways he develops himself, and in the course of long ages becomes the civilized being which we know as the white man. (The World and Its People: A new Series of Geography Readers (London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1908), 13) 63. Hewa, 2-6 passim.

64. T.R. Smith, “On Buildings for European Occupation in Tropical Climates, Especially India,” Proceedings of the RIBA (1868-9), cited in Anthony D. King, “Exporting Planning: The Colonial and Neo-Colonial Experience,” Urbanism Past and Present, 5 (1977): 18.

65. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, (Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1988), 13.

66. Goonatilake, Aborted Discovery, 82, 72, 86, 111.

67. Christovam Buarque, The End of Economics? Ethics and the Disorder of Progress (London: Zed Books, 1993), 12, 39.

68. Steven Kemper, The Presence of the Past: Chronicles, Politics, and Culture in Singhala Life (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991), 85.

69. See Davy, 219.

70. Kemper, 116.

71. Mendis, Colebrooke-Cameron Papers, I: 68.

72. Mendis, Ceylon Under the British, 53, 105, 115.

73. Swarna Jayaweera, “Language and Colonial educational Policy in Ceylon in the Nineteenth Century,” Modern Ceylon Studies 2 (1971): 154, 156.

74. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 1968).

75. See Mills, Ceylon Under British Rule, 134, 135, 240.

76. Dharmasena, “Colombo,” 160.

77. Ferguson, Ceylon in 1903, ciii.

78. Turner, 152.

79. Cave, 1.

80. Mills, Ceylon Under British Rule, 245.

81. Ferguson, Ceylon in 1903, 24; Hulugalle, Centenary Volume, 141, 148; Cave, 37.

82. Cave, 41. Italics are mine.

83. Ibid, 42.

84. Perera, The Ceylon Railway, 11, 28, 33-34; van den Driesen, Indian Plantation Labor, 116.

85. Headrick, 97; Mendis, Ceylon Under the British, 66; Turner, 192.

86. E.J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Capital (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1975); King, Colonialism, Urbanism, and the World-Economy, 93-4.

87. Anthony D. King, “Colonialism and the Development of the Modern South Asian City: Theoretical Considerations,” in Kenneth Ballhatchet and John Harrison, eds., The City in South Asia: Pre-Modern and Modern (London: Curzon Press, 1980): 1-19.

88. Cave, 2.

89. Urwick, 31.

90. Casie Chitty, 81.

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93

91. See Pamela Kanwar, Imperial Simla: The Political Culture of the Raj (Delhi, Oxford University press, 1990), 48.

92.Cordiner, 314-5.

93. Turner, 265.

94. Ananda K. Coomaraswami, Medieval Singhalese Art (Colombo: Government Press, 1962 [1908]), 116-7.

95. See King, Colonial Urban Development, 159; E.P. Thompson, “Time, WorkDiscipline, and Industrial Capitalism,” Past and Present 38 (1967): 60.

96. Carlo M. Cipolla, Clocks and Culture 1300-1700 (New York: W.W. Norton, 1978), 104.

97. Valentia, 274.

98. Ferguson, Ceylon in 1903, 106. See also Wright, The Politics of Design, 186.

99. Ferguson, “Old and New Colombo,” cxiii.

100. Percival, 174.

101. Cave, 54, 57; Michael Roberts, Colombo in the Round: Outlines of its Growth in Modern Times, Paper presented at the “Second International Conference on Indian Ocean Studies” held at Perth, Western Australia, December 5-12, 11-12.

102. See Ferguson, “Old and New Colombo,” cxiii; Hulugalle, 74; Cave, 77.

103. Ceylon Government Railway, One Hundred Years, 1864-1964 (Colombo: Government Press, [1965]), 26; Perera, The Ceylon Railway, 190.

104. Roberts, Colombo in the Round, 10.

105. See Christopher, 28.

106. See Wright, The Politics of Design. See also King, Urbanism, Colonialism and the World-Economy, 60; Metcalf, “Architecture and the Representation of Empire”; Norma Evenson, The Indian Metropolis: A View Toward the West (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 83-84.

107. Wright, The Politics of Design, 11.

108. See King, Urbanism, Colonialism and the World-Economy, 60; See also Metcalf, “Architecture and the Representation of Empire”.

109. King, Colonial Urban Development, 59.

110. Bandaranayake, “Sri Lanka and Monsoon Asia.”

111. See King, The Bungalow.

112. Metcalf, “Architecture and the Representation of Empire,” 39.

113. Evenson, 83.

114. See Metcalf, “Architecture and the Representation of Empire,” 62.

115. See for example, King, Urbanism, Colonialism and the World-Economy, 42.

116. Roberts, “Irrigation in British Ceylon” 50.

117. See Ferguson, Ceylon in 1903, cxiii; Cave, 61.

118. Duncan, The City as Text.