4: Indigenizing Space and the Elite Responses to Colonialism

4 Indigenizing Colonial Spaces: Ceylonese Adaptations to the Colonial System British imperialism, British hegemony among core capitalist states, and the expansion of the European world-economy all reached their highest point in the late nineteenth century. 1 Towards the end of the century, Britain was subjected to increasing economic and political competition by countries following in its path, particularly the United States and Germany. The ending of the British lead by its W estern competitors, however, produced what Arrighi calls “systemic chaos,” 2 leading to two world wars. The vital sign of the crisis in power balance among the metropolitan powers was the return of war to Europe after a long period. At the same time, the Third (Communist) International posed the first serious political threat to the capitalist world-economy, a threat that turned out to be real with the Soviet Revolution of 1917. Terence K. Hopkins suggests that the Dutch, British, and United States hegemonies can be conceptualized as historic “moments” in the rise, dominion, and demise of the capitalist world-economy.3 In this sense, these events marked the beginning of a long term decline of the Europe-centered world, particularly the capitalist world-economy and its constituent political structure.

Concurrent with US and German emulation of Britain, the nascent elite of Ceylon also followed British (colonial) models of wealth, power, and prestige. This process of emulation was articulated by elites seeking to rise to the topmost positions in colonial political, economic, and administrative systems, particularly the Legislative Council and the plantation system. However, the socialist movement that emerged in the 1930s chose to contest colonial rule as a whole. In this chapter, I focus on the processes by which the Ceylonese advanced their political, economic, and cultural positions within the colonial society, especially where these had spatial implications. I shall also shift the vantage point of my inquiry from the European construction of a world-space (and society), and a

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Ceylon within this, to Ceylonese responses and reactions to these structures, with their ensuing spatial outcomes.

This strategy I employ to separate this and the following chapter thematically should not suggest that indigenous reactions and responses to the colonial society and space were constructed within a simple duality of emulations and challenges.

In some way or another, all Ceylonese adapted themselves to colonial structures as well as contested them. I have, therefore, expanded the scope of this chapter to include discussion of a broader array of institutions, processes, and agencies that did not explicitly collide with the colonial system, such as the village and internal migrants. I begin by sketching out the transformations of British imperial space and the capitalist world-economy during the decline of British hegemony.

The Demise of Empires and Post-Imperial Space The demise of British hegemony was to bring about the collapse of the particular system of states and empires constructed by west European powers from the seventeenth century and led to the reorganization of the European world-space. By the last decades of the nineteenth century, the United States and Germany had advanced themselves to the position of prospective leading economic and political powers of the capitalist world. The policies of these two countries towards the states and empires contrasted with each other. Germany’s quest to strengthen its position within the capitalist world-system had moved it towards a strategy of territorial expansion within Europe, culminating in the two world wars. Although it rescued the system of states, the United States did not favor the continuation of west European empires. The territorial outcome of this was an expanded global version of the Euro-American inter-state system, institutionalized through world organizations such as the United Nations and W orld B ank. In addition, mass decolonization produced a series of new states, the social and spatial structures of which were largely determined by their colonial predecessors.

In contrast to other European imperial powers such as the French and Portuguese, the British were quick to decolonize. British governments had already begun to reorganize their imperial space into what was called the British Commonwealth as early as the 1920s. According to Tinker, both Conservative and Labour Parties alike perceived the British Empire as a series of territories to which the British people could emigrate.4 The most significant British objective, however, was to retain its naval and airborne strength, if not superiority, in the world. This was evident in its retention of geo-strategic nodes, such as Singapore and Diego Garcia, in the India Ocean. 5 British concession of dominion status for Ceylon in the 1930s was aimed at retaining “the island as a loyal member of the Commonwealth, with its naval and air installations available as important links in the chain of imperial communications and defense.� 6 Ceylon not only provided the only existing fleet base between Malta and Singapore, it also occupied a commanding position as a base for defense communication without which control over the Indian Ocean would be weakened.7

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Hence, the British were cautious not to antagonize the Ceylonese political elite.

Although the new system of states expanded the European inter-state system across the world, the space of the ex-Empire was inscribed within it. Technical assistance programs such as the Colombo Plan, the Commonwealth Games, and the Crown acted as symbols of unity for the ex-Empire. Ex-colonial states were represented in the high commission buildings constructed in the new capital cities of Commonwealth states. By the 1960s, the post-colonial leaders had made the Commonwealth a convenient and constitutionally undemanding club of rulers who had taken over from the British.8 Elite Adaptation of Colonial Institutions and Spaces In Ceylon, the late 1870s and 1880s also marked the turning point in important socio-spatial processes, from production of colonial subjects to the indigenizing of colonial economic, political, and administrative structures, in the process making a proto-“national space.� W here confrontation with the colonial order of things had at first disoriented the native, subsequently--and due to power relations--the colonial system became a world of which the native was envious. 9 The merging of subjects and colonial structures took place through both the westernizing of subjects and the indigenization of larger social and political structures and spaces. The changes caused by these developments were wide-ranging, and included Buddhist and Hindu revivals. This section, however, concentrates on the activities of three significant groups; the nascent Ceylonese entrepreneurs, politicians, and administrators.

Ceylonese penetration into the capitalist space economy of Ceylon began as early as the first decades following the construction of plantations. This process gained momentum in the 1880s and eventually culminated with independence.

British concentration on plantations, banking, and long distance trade, directed Ceylonese entrepreneurs, lacking in capital, to invest in such sectors as transportation, consumer services, and arrack renting. As these areas were complementary to those of the British, Ceylonese entrepreneurs therefore expanded and strengthened the colonial capitalist structure.

Despite their worldwide naval superiority, and prior to the introduction of railways in the 1860s, the British had no more efficient means of overland transportation in Ceylon than had the Ceylonese. This advantage was immediately captured by the latter, who monopolized the system of transportation, largely consisting of bullock carts, especially between Colombo and Kandy. In this way, these investors established the vital economic link between the plantations around Kandy and the economic command functions in Colombo, unifying the capitalist space. W ith the introduction of railways, however, the colonial state reappropriated the control of this communication axis.

Ceylonese entrepreneurs who undertook the more difficult task of penetrating into the plantation arena were more successful in the longer run. Unlike in India where indigenous capitalists competed with the British, Ceylonese planters surreptitiously sneaked into the plantation complex without generating conflict.

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They eventually appropriated the peasant grown coconut as a plantation crop--as the British had done with coffee. Coconut cultivation along the western coast was dominated by the Low-Country Sinhalese, with the European planters never exceeding five percent of the total. By 1900, the area under coconut had increased to 41% of the total cultivated land in Ceylon, compared to 32% of paddy and 20% of tea.10 In this way, Ceylonese entrepreneurs expanded the plantation complex, increasing the overall area of plantations to over three times that owned by the British, and also diversifying the crop. However, tea remained the core of the production system in Ceylon, and the main export earner of Ceylon until the 1980s.

W ithin the plantation complex, Ceylonese investments were, therefore, supplementary and subordinate to those of the British.

The new Ceylonese entrepreneurial class emerged from the south-western quadrant, subsequently known as the Low-Country. Over a century of violent resistance, adaptation to the colonial system had become a significant aspect of the Low-Country inhabitants’ response to foreign military power. Elite formation in the Low-Country largely began within particular castes--Karava, Salagama, and Durawa (primarily fisher, cinnamon peeling, and toddy tapping). The leadership of the anti-colonial Kandyan aristocracy was thus being replaced by this emerging entrepreneurial class of the Low-Country.

Cooperation of the Ceylonese elite with the British also extended to the political arena. As in the plantations, Ceylonese participation in the colonial government began as early as the 1830s with the establishment of the Executive and Legislative Councils. Caste competition, central to elite formation in Ceylon, continued in the arena of appointment of legislators; in this context the Karava elite strove to enlarge and reform the Council through gradual constitutional reform. The development of a constitutionalist approach in order to increase Ceylonese representation in the colonial legislature was, to a large degree, the result of W estern education that had taught them about British government and W estern democracy.11 The third important group groomed under colonialism was that of the administrators. In the early days of their rule, the British mainly employed the sons of former Lankan administrators, Mudliyars.12 Low-Country Mudliyars were first incorporated into the Portuguese administration and their adaptation to the British service was represented in their wearing of sixteenth century Portuguese uniforms even in the early twentieth century. 13 Their aristocratic family origins, political power, and “modern attainments” such as English education made them part of the elite. In 1870, for example, five out of eight Ceylonese in the civil service were from Low-Country Mudliyar families. 14 W hat the British colonial culture achieved in Ceylon was a high degree of hegemony among the elite, families of owners of plantations and mines and native administrators, with their sons educated in England and being Christian in faith.

According to Singer, it was forgivable for a graduate of Royal or St. Thomas College not to know who followed King Rajasinghe I to the Lion Throne, but downright unthinkable for him not to know who signed the Magna Carta. 15 The first

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Ceylonese to seek higher education in England were a full three decades ahead of the Indian pioneers of 1844. 16 The elite jealously guarded their culture from further diffusion, using this to symbolize their privileged position among the Ceylonese, and perhaps increasingly exaggerating their metropolitan culture as a buttress to maintain their social and cultural identity.17 The elite sub-culture was not British, but an elite construction that adapted British colonial culture to Ceylonese cultural conditions in a way that would represent their power to the average Ceylonese, and their worthiness to the colonial community. Governor Henry M acCallum wrote in 1910, [it] is precisely the acquisition of European ideas and the adoption of European in preference to Ceylonese civilization that differentiates this class from their countrymen. ... [and separates them] by a wide gulf from the majority of the native inhabitants of the colony. Their ideas, their aspirations, their interests ... are all moulded upon European models and are no longer those of the majority of their countrymen.18 Emulating the British model, the elite, who were nevertheless not allowed membership of British clubs, also created their own, the exclusive Oriental Club in the vicinity of Cinnamon Gardens.19 Indigenizing the colonial administration was therefore a challenge since the Ceylonese had to comply with the rigorous rules of the administration and also had to face competition from the metropolitan British. According to Singer, apart from being a Lankan chief--who controlled enough power locally to force the British to incorporate him and his function into their administration--the only hope of joining the colonial administration was by “out-Englishing” Englishmen. Yet competition from England largely ensured a complete British domination of the administration.

Even as late as the 1920s, 20 Ceylonese held only eleven out of a total of ninety administrative positions. By that time, however, the upper class Ceylonese had become sufficiently vocal to win concessions from the colonial regime, so that by the 1930s, Ceylonese civil service were in a majority. The Ceylon State Council officially resolved in 1934 to implement a policy of Ceylonization in all branches of public services.21 Ambiguities in the National Spatial Structure For the elite, therefore, independence was merely a peaceful transfer of power and did not imply significant changes in the larger economic, administrative, and ideological structures. The first decade after independence was marked by a matching of the interests, intentions, and desires of the ruling national elite with the “post-colonial” political, economic, and cultural systems constructed by the British in consultation with them. 22 Hence, independent Ceylon was largely a constituent element of both the larger world-wide system of states and the British post-imperial space. In this section, I examine the spatial construction of the “national space” of post-independent Ceylon.

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The consciousness of Ceylon becoming a single state precipitated the reconstruction of cultural differences and identities within the society.23 This was manifest in the increased intra-group competition among the elite. For example, in 1931, the Tamil elite had shifted its policy of 1910, of having reasonable representation for Tamils in the Legislative Council, to wanting equal weight for Tamils and Sinhalese.24 In the environmental realm, the Sinhalese were already reclaiming and restoring the historic and sacred places belonging to the Rajarata civilization, the locus of which is the north of the central mountainous region. I refer here to the restoring of sacred places, including Ven Naranvita Sumanasara taking residence at a main temple site of Anuradhapura, Ruwanveliseya, in the 1870s, and irrigation systems, making the ancient Lankan capital, Anuradhapura, the focus of this effort. 25 Important markers in this development include the formation of the Sinhalese-nationalist party, Sinhala Mahajana Sabhawa in 1919, and the decision of a prominent Tamil leader, Ponnambalam Arunachalam, to leave the Ceylon National Congress in 1921 with its Low-Country Sinhalese majority.

For the constitutionalists, however, independence largely meant gaining control over the colonial state. As in seventeenth century Europe, the form of nation building in the post-colonial periphery was also a process of first creating the state and then homogenizing its space and subjects to produce “nations.” Ironically, a particular homogenization of the society and space of Ceylon had already been carried out by the colonial regime, through the subduing of cultural differences.

This society was, therefore, not produced through the articulation of various groups within a single Ceylonese society, but rather by imposition from outside, and by forces external to it.

The central characteristics of colonial Ceylon did not change much after independence; even the British naval and airborne installations were retained until the mid-1950s. Raised within the colonial system, the post-colonial elite did not question the appropriateness of colonial administrative divisions, or of a national urban structure with the territoriality peripheral colonial port city, Colombo, at its head. Hence, the territories and societies which the Lankans had lost in the sixteenth century to European imperial powers and what the Ceylonese recovered in the twentieth were radically different. Historically, what the single post-colonial state replaced were four Lankan kingdoms and a number of principalities and port cities that existed prior to colonization.

Nonetheless, the post-colonial rulers of Ceylon used their new authority to restructure certain aspects of the society and space of Ceylon. Crucially, the postcolonial regime viewed Ceylon as their space, and did not readily accept all colonial subjects as nationals. To begin with, the Sinhalese elite were not ready to accept the plantation workers of southern Indian origin, classifying them as “Indian Tamils” and reaffirmed that they were a foreign population. This was despite the words of D.S. Senanayake, who later became the first Prime Minister of independent Ceylon, who wrote in 1928, “W e do not consider the Indians as aliens.

W e tell them ‘become part of ourselves, become Ceylonese, and then share in the government of the country.’” 26

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W ithin two years, the United National Party government of 1948 deprived the plantation workers of southern Indian origin of both their citizenship and voting rights. They had already participated in the socialist-led struggles for independence in the 1940s and their voting pattern had helped many socialist candidates win in the 1947 elections. If anti-colonial struggles had brought these plantation workers into Ceylonese politics and the “national” space, the post-colonial state denied these. As the planters had attempted, the post-colonial rulers of Ceylon also resorted to apartheid, re-directing the hatred shown by Kandyan peasantry against plantation owners into one against plantation workers.

Another major concern of the post-colonial rulers was economic and political “self-sufficiency.” Since Ceylon had been part of the British Empire, its selfsufficiency was not a principal concern. The state was more concerned with its military and political interests until the 1820s, and with the plantation enterprise in the three decades that followed. 27 The colonial state had, therefore, let the Lankan system of rice production and irrigation fall into disrepair, making the colony dependent upon imports. For the colonial state, the principal economic unit was the Empire. Yet within the perception of a self-contained national unit, the postcolonial rulers viewed the self-sufficiency of Ceylon as an essential national requirement.

This national policy had three premises. First, the notion of “development” that became hegemonic in the 1950s also implied self-sufficiency for most states in the post-colonial periphery. Second, the state assumed that self-sufficiency in rice could be achieved, as the ancients had done, by revitalizing and expanding the ancient, but partly ruined, irrigation infrastructure. Third, this assumes an earlier Lankan historic period in which self-sufficiency was a societal norm. Although historically this may have operated at the level of the village, and under colonialism at an imperial scale, the post-colonial concern was to achieve self-sufficiency at the national level.

The revitalization of segments of ancient irrigation infrastructure had already begun under the colonial regime in the late nineteenth century. It was thought in the 1860s that irrigation works would generate greater revenue for the colonial state, promoting the production of paddy and providing a stimulus to trade and industry. 28 This policy has been continued by the post-colonial government and, by 1980, nearly 90,000 farming families had been settled in 105 major irrigation projects consisting of about a million acres. Rice paddy production rose from about 450,000 tons in 1953 to two million tons in 1983.29 Settlers for colonies were easily found in those the authorities saw as overcrowding the so-called W et Zone--the southwestern quadrant which receives sufficient annual rainfall not to require irrigation for paddy cultivation. The Land Commission in 1929 had defined “colonization” as “the relief of congestion in certain localities by the settlement of peasants on vacant lands outside their own villages.” 30 The post-colonial state completely ignored the existing old villages, purana gam, and incorporated them into colonies stamped out on a much larger scale. In the Chandrikawewa area, for example, purana gam had been small

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hamlets of about fifty to sixty people and had small clearings of about two acres each of highland crops land. 31 These villagers’ voices were not heard until Tamil political parties made ethnicity-based allegations about these settlements.

For the post-colonial government, colonization was a “national planning” strategy. First, it was a strategy for integrating remote areas into the national space by means of government sponsored settlement of peasants from more integrated areas, a process of “internal colonization.” Second, it was aimed at redistributing the population nationally, moving them from what the authorities saw as more congested areas to “vacant lands,” with national economic goals such as increased employment and self-sufficiency in mind. The original criteria for the selection of settlers had been dominated by what was considered to be the [economic] needs of the prospective settlers, determined by the size of the family, landlessness, and unemployment. In 1968, this was complemented by a concern for reliability, adding the criteria of previous experience in irrigation-based cultivation, familiarity with so-called improved farming practices, and credit-worthiness.32 Although the desirability of a lot, large by peasant standards, was never thoroughly investigated,33 its size was calculated to match the land requirement of a self-sufficient farming family. Hence, settlers were not allowed to subdivide these lots among their children, but required to pass on the full parcel to one child. The standard allotment of eight acres (five of paddy and three highland), was reduced to five acres (three of paddy and two highland) in 1952, and to three acres (two of paddy and one highland) after the introduction in the 1970s of new high yield varieties of rice. 34 In the late 1960’s, however, the authorities of the most ambitious irrigation scheme, the Mahaweli Project, clarified the objective of fixing the standard allotment as the optimum utilization of basic resources of land, labor, and capital, bearing in mind that land and capital are scarce national resources while labor is an abundant resource.35 Colonization was, therefore, not the revitalization of former Lankan villages, but rather a compromise between creating villages and plantations; modern villages that produce a food crop for the market in addition to looking after its own subsistence needs. They were not organically developed, but planned from Colombo according to a model in which settlement units were replicated with very little variation. 36 The mass produced hamlets did not have names, but simply identification tags--a tract number, a tract being a sub-unit of the colony--useful for the colonizing agency in Colombo to differentiate each unit.

W hat the government has provided were primarily large reservoirs that constituted large irrigation systems. For example, Chandrikawewa was expected to irrigate 5,000 acres of virgin forest. Planning and development was also carried out at that scale and not at village scale, using heavy machinery for the clearing of land, ridging of paddy fields, and construction of canals and roads, homogenizing the landscape. The methods of mass construction were complemented by the mass production of smaller building units across the settlements. (figure 4.1) The use of type plans for infrastructure buildings and houses and the replication of service

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centers homogenized the built environment, undermining the identity of each individual settlement.37 In contrast to villages, “colonies” were more commercialized, the population was heterogenous, and the settlers were more individualized. The commodification of land emphasized the ownership of land over the traditional right to water. In early stages, however, land ownership was attractive to prospective settlers.

Despite the settlers’ desire to lessen the cost of cultivation, the employment of customary self-help methods, such as attam and kaiyya, was deterred by large landholding and individualism. Attam “contract” requires the settlers to free up time to work on others’ fields, but large individual lots would not allow this. The settlers’ response was to employ paid labor and “build” communities with those from their home villages. They continued to maintain strong ties with their home villages, and also brought labor from their home village.38 Colonization became very expensive for the post-colonial state. 39 The W orld Bank mission of 1951 recommended the reduction of the standard allotment, the cost of clearance borne by the government, and the government subsidy on colonists’ (sic) dwelling houses. In 1966, a Bank mission highlighted the urgent need to increase productivity per acre. Despite the increasing cost on the principal irrigation structures, however, governments have attempted to reduce the direct expenditure on settlers.

Independence produced an ambivalence in the spatial order of Ceylon, particularly reinforced by the post-colonial adoption of the colonial administrative center, Colombo, as its capital. Unlike historic Lankan “urban centers,” which were associated with temples, Colombo was a secular city which linked the Ceylonese political economy with that of the metropole. W hile Colombo continued to function as the center of the Ceylonese polity, economy, as well as the capitalist culture, the religious and cultural organization of Ceylon reproduced the centrality of their historic centers, for example, Anuradhapura, Kandy, and Jaffna.

This multicentricity, however, did not generate any disorder in Ceylonese society and space, but rather a split-site until the 1980s.

In addition to producing a Ceylon which expressed their values, the elite had also to transform themselves to be a part of the this new state. The increasing use of national dress by the members of the Legislative Council was part of this process.

FIGURE 4.1 Colonization Projects: Core houses provided in the Uda Walawa development project.

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Yet the views of the national leadership epitomized the paternalism of the elite towards the villagers.40 Reconnecting with Sinhalese history, though to a lesser degree, the state also assumed the patronage of Buddhism. Buddhism in this context might be understood as the “reformed version” which many of the elite studied in English, and some in Oxford, for the first time. 41 Although only implicit at times, the increase in significance of historic Buddhist centers in the post-colonial political arena is illustrated by the fact that every ministerial cabinet of newly formed governments made a pilgrimage to the Temple of the Tooth at Kandy. The height of this new “tradition” was reached in 1977, when Prime Minister J.R. Jayawardene, following a former royal tradition, addressed the “nation” from the octagonal Pattirippuwa of the Temple. Since the Low-Country elite changed their religion many times in order to retain power, this can be seen as part of the process of the re-adapting of the elite.42 W hat we see, therefore, in the post-colonial, national territorial and urban spatial structures is a multivalence. Although the elite had developed their identity within a system of colonial values, and focusing on the colonial port city, independence changed the ground beneath it, making Colombo the capital of Ceylon. If the elite had derived its political power principally by peaceful bargaining with the authorities in London, with independence they had to rely on, and negotiate with, the average Ceylonese. It is this transition that brought about a multivalent social, cultural, and spatial formation.

The Restructuring of M arginalized Institutions and Spaces Despite its dominance, the colonial socio-spatial structure was not total, but incomplete; many Lankan social and cultural institutions and practices continued inside, and outside, but marginal to, the principal colonial structures. The village and Buddhism are two such institutions which carried Lankan traditional worldviews across the colonial rupture of time. The continuity of Lankan institutions and practices within a colonial and capitalist society, however, required their restructuring. This section discusses on the restructuring of Lankan rural villages (gamas) under colonialism.

The colonial regime had periodically attempted to make the village useful to its economic system. In the early stages, the state desired to transform villages into a source of tax revenue. In creating plantations, the state appropriated land from certain villages, coercing the inhabitants into plantation lines. In the 1840s and 1850s, colonial officials proposed to restore the ancient reservoirs in the Dry Zone and settle south Indians, transforming this region into an area of cash crop production and a more convenient source of labor for the plantations. 43 Later, with “colonization,” sporadically distributed purana gam were incorporated into its planned settlement system. These developments indicate that rural Ceylon was marginal to the colonial system and the state wished to transform it into a more meaningful and useful element of colonial Ceylon.

The villagers’ initial response was one of apathy. Their refusal to join the

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plantations, as well as rebellions, were also typical reactions of the villagers, particularly in Kandy. In the longer run, however, villagers restructured their gamas within the new conditions. According to Cohen, “Anthropological <others’ are part of the colonial world. ... [yet] these <others’ had to restructure their world to encompass the fact of white domination and their own powerlessness.” 44 Although the villages were never fully integrated into the colonial society, the colonial policies towards them gradually eroded their foundations. The neglect of the irrigation infrastructure, much needed for the production of food crops, weakened the economic base of the village; the abolition of rajakariya had the effect of a sudden demolition of the communal machinery which maintained village irrigation facilities. 45 The restructuring efforts from within the village were complemented by state intervention. From the 1860s, the colonial regime developed a concern for what they saw as “deteriorating” villages and began supporting these through the revitalization of ancient irrigation schemes, financial assistance, technical supervision, and facilitating the enforcement of customs relating to paddy cultivation. The reintroduction of the ancient gamsabhava in the 1850s marked the changing point in the balance of forces, between the village and the state, from conflict to corporation. As the mutual co-operation in former villages was undermined by the new forces of trade, individualism, and ownership, disputes over the ownership of land and the use of water began to rise. Litigation prospered as a means of negotiating this transition. The original purpose of the new gamsabhava was to reduce the number of cases that came to courts and to reduce the cost by passing over the responsibility to the village itself.46 The reintroduction of the gamsabhava was, therefore, an endeavor to make use of ancient regulations and institutions to pass the responsibility of solving these disputes to the village. The new gamsabhavas were under the chairmanship of the Government Agent (or his nominee). 47 These were called into action only when a ‘rule’ was broken, and were to enforce their decisions through fines. Simple in form and summary in action, gamsabhavas were resuscitated in partial form to act as liaison between people and the white govt. 48 This was also the beginning of the state’s co-opting of the village into the colonial society and space.

More profound changes took place in rural areas in the early twentieth century.

Intervening into the so-called problem of rural debt, the colonial state created Cooperative Credit Associations in 1911. By 1927, there were more than 303 societies with a membership of 35,112 operating under state supervision.49 Despite the slow integration process, paths and roads gained increasing significance in gamas. This development demonstrates the integration of former self-sufficient, inward-oriented gamas into the larger urban structure and division of labor as food production units of Ceylon. The infiltration of norms of private property into villages is reflected in the separation of private lots, the appearance of the fence demarcating the significance of private property and public paths connecting to the larger urban system, and the use of paths as a central device for organizing dwellings and farm land.

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The most glaring transformation was, however, in the increasing replacement of communal spaces by more institutionalized social infrastructure, such as schools, cooperative stores, and sub-post offices. In this process, while some of the communal spaces disappeared others were absorbed into the private sphere. For example, the function of storing grain in courtyards, bihi, formed by a particular layout of dwellings, was largely absorbed by individual dwellings. And the meaning of central spaces, known as tisbamba, has been replaced by modern “village centers.” In this way the villages became increasingly centrally organized, after the urban model, around administrative, commercial and, most importantly, communication facilities that connected these to the “outer world,” replacing the former centrality of the temple and the irrigation reservoir.

Yet none of these developments was capable of completely “modernizing” the rural built environment, nor of radically transforming rural building methods and building forms. Most notably, villagers continued their spatial traditions at the scale of building and locale. The “small building tradition,” according to Andrew Boyd, is a minor episode in the long and rich history of Lankan art, but it has the interest of being alive when most of the other traditions have come to an almost complete stop. 50 (figure 4.2) The subordination of the Lankan upper classes and the destruction of their organization of state-craftsmen created a large decrease in the “historic” building activity. Increasingly, the wealthier Ceylonese began imitating European ideas and manners, supported by an English educational system which marginalized Lankan history. Yet the ordinary peasant houses were always built by peasants themselves and not by professional craftsmen. The Lankan cultural tradition, therefore, passed out of the hands of the upper classes but lived on among the common people.

Particularly, rural incomes did not increase sufficiently to transform rural cultures or allow the successful mimicking of urban dwelling forms and methods.

Despite the introduction of industrially-produced materials such as cement, a large proportion of house building activity in villages is still carried out by the villagers themselves. Materials and technology used in house building activity, the use of self-help methods, incrementally constructing over a long period of time, and the transformability of the size and form of dwellings according to the changing size and needs of their inhabitants, demonstrate the continuity of many aspects of former villages. This continuity is also reflected in the large proportion (77%) of owner occupation of rural dwellings.51 At a more abstract level, the time and space in which villagers operate, occupy, and also construct their houses are significantly different from those of the so-called urban middle classes. 52 In addition to religions, their worldview includes astrology, vastu vidya--historic architectural principles of south Asia--and other customs.

Many villagers still get an astrologer to work out an auspicious time to begin construction as well as to occupy a new dwelling. For example, they boil milk as a sign of prosperity when entering a new house and, sometimes, invite Buddhist bhikkus to chant pirith. Instead of adhering to the mundane norms of the city, villagers continue to employ a degree of vastu vidya, infused with astrological

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beliefs based on indigenous conceptions of time and space developed over two thousand years.

The continuity of rural building methods suggests that most villagers were not readily incorporated into so-called market economies under colonialism. Villagers have continued to produce one of the most efficient house types, combining internal and external spaces. Unlike the specialized monofunctional rooms of the upper classes, villagers have continued their practice of building multi-functional spaces. 53 According to Bandaranayake, it has ... solved major problems of structural design, ventilation and insulation, while providing only a minimum necessary amount of internal accommodation, by an ingenious combination of internal and external facilities for production, processing, storage and leisure activities. In short, it is a great historical invention and forms an essential part of the domestic economy, technology, social life and culture of the village.54 W hile the rhythm of rural life still contrasts with urban life, urban influences have also seeped in over the last three hundred years. Following urbanistic values, not only are there aspirations among villagers to build a so-called â&#x20AC;&#x153;permanentâ&#x20AC;? house one day, but many contemporary rural houses also have furniture (apart from utensils), sometimes television, individual services such as a well and a toilet, and specialized spaces for different functions such as sleeping and eating.

How people think affects how they build and what they build indicates their cultural notions about space. 55 The language used in building is therefore an indicator of what aspects of building have been influenced by what culture. 56 The Portuguese, and particularly the Dutch, who had initial contact with the Lankans, diffused a crucial set of terms covering a variety of elements, such as building methods and the modern organization of conceptualized spaces and furniture, defining space. 57 The circular column and the Roman arch are two striking examples of colonial influences. 58 The Sri Lankan building vocabulary suggests the direct transfer of a range of spaces, building elements, and methods. For example, the gable, in some sense, evolved in Holland during the so-called Renaissance was reproduced abroad, including in Ceylon.59 In other cases, it was simply the use of

FIGURE 4.2 Cultural continuity: The rural house.

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western terminology to identify an indigenous element. Even if colonial terms renamed already existing Lankan spaces or building elements, the process of naming transformed those. For example, although “veranda” resembles a traditional Lankan space, it remains different from the pila or tinnai, which is an elevated semi-outdoor space protected by a roof overhang.60 As much as buildings and building elements, furniture is also a constituent element of interior space. Domestic furniture has also been radically transformed during the colonial period. According to Percival, “where luxury seems almost unknown, sumptuous furniture is not to be expected, even in the best houses” of the Ceylonese.61 Instead, their so-called household furniture largely consisted of necessary utensils--as opposed to consumption- and comfort-oriented objects and art work. According to Coomaraswami, Sinhalese furniture was not only simple, there was also a hierarchy built into it; only the king sat on a “chair” with an arm.62 An Englishman once observed that, “if we may judge from the example of India, the great art in furniture is to do without it.” In contrast, “the British equipped their interiors with a variety of bulky objects.” 63 This was a major influence in transforming the organization of the overall space and form of the dwelling which accommodated such furniture and the practices attached to it.

Despite influences, however, the line of mimicry, with the indigenes imitating the culture, knowledge, practices, and built forms produced in the metropole, transmitted through Colombo, did not fully reach the village. In continuing Lankan “traditions” (or proto-traditions), villages, religions, and the custom have kept alive the prospect of developing new ideas based on these traditions. Some of such nodes were later deployed by nationalists, socialists, separatists, as well as--in the realm of architecture--“critical-vernacularists.” These issues will be addressed in the next two chapters.

M igration and the Spatial Restructuring of Colombo W hile the upper classes were Ceylonizing the main British sites in Colombo, migrants complemented this process in other quarters. The population of Colombo grew from a meager 28,000 in 1800, to about 150,000 in 1900. 64 Migration, the immediate principal cause of this growth, transformed Colombo into a “primate city,” a city with the largest population, many times larger than the next largest cities. In the 1870s, Colombo Municipal Council area held twice as many people as both Galle and Kandy. By the 1920s, this proportion had increased to six times.65 Since Colombo represented only one level in the hierarchy of the colonial urban system, emigration continued to London, and later, to other settler colonies in the Empire such as Australia and Canada, as well as the United States. In this section, I briefly explore how a Colombo constructed by the colonial powers was Ceylonized, feminized, and ruralized by migrants.

The colonial spatial structure created as part of metropolitan capital’s drive to extract profits from rurally located plantations was different from the process of

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surplus extraction in the metropole itself. Knox and Agnew have argued that there was only a limited stimulus to the growth of a distinctive urban economy, as the orientation of urban networks was towards exploitation of hinterlands rather than an industry--and service--based urban economy. 66 W hile the provincial and district capitals of Ceylon did not contain a significant proportion of production functions, plantation areas did not have any significant urban centers. The principal towns of Ceylon were, therefore, centers of administration, economic command, capital accumulation, and consumption, and not industrial production. Although the hill stations, Nuwara Eliya and Kandy, were important as centers of consumption during colonialism, and some redistribution of resources took place in them, Colombo represented by far the most dominant urban center. For the average Ceylonese, therefore, the main attraction was Colombo, where all economic and administrative functions culminated and most opportunities existed. Until the 1960s Colombo was the only city with a population of over 100,000 people.

Urbanization in the “Third W orld” has sometimes been compared to the same process as taken by the industrialized states of Europe and America, seen anomalously, and expressed through notions such as urbanization without industrialization, tertiary sector employment, and primate cities, all with negative connotations. Yet there were 69 factories dispersed in and around Colombo in 1910.67 These factories included coconut oil mills, foundries for plantation machinery, other engineering workshops, saw mills, aerated water plants, printing presses, and plants for processing crops for export. It was, however, not these factories which gave rise to Colombo, as with W estern industrial cities, but rather, Colombo attracted them as an appropriate location.

Colonialism both underdeveloped and “modernized” the colonies simultaneously. 68 In regard to Colombo, Turner wrote in the 1920s, Of the towns of Ceylon, the most important and progressive is the capital, Colombo. ... [It] possesses most of the refinements of modern civilization, up-to-date hotels; electric light, fans, and tramways; an excellent water supply; an up-to-date system of water-borne drainage; and extensive emporia of all kinds of goods. 69 In addition to modernizing Colombo and the colonial urban system, the colonial state also produced modern subjects. In rural areas, the younger generations were increasingly “modernized” through education, the principal means of diffusion of W estern urban-centric values. Young and aspiring men produced by this system were unable to see much opportunity to succeed in the rural environment. Despite the bias towards capitalist industrial societies, urban, capitalist, and industrial spaces were limited in Ceylon. Many people, therefore, moved to Colombo, as much for new opportunities as to escape from the limitations they saw in their “traditional” environments, and looked towards the capitalist arena and cities for opportunities, though not toward the plantations.

The introduction and expansion of communication networks facilitated the rural to urban movement. The principal purpose of the communication infrastructure was

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to organize the political, economic, and administrative systems and spread these outward from Colombo to rural areas along a hierarchy of urban centers. Yet the migrants reversed this directionality, employing the transport networks as a means of moving to Colombo. This is evident in the influx of people to Colombo from the 1880s, especially the Tamils from Jaffna, particularly with the opening of the Colombo-Jaffna railway line in 1905. Compared to the growth of the national population by 18% between 1921 and 1931, the North Central Province grew by less than 1%, and the Northern and Eastern Provinces by less than 10%. 70 The migrants, in turn, used the communication network as a two-way system, maintaining their relationships between their villages of origin and their new residence in Colombo. 71 As mentioned above, colonial Colombo was a relatively cosmopolitan city; a large proportion of its population were not the residents of former Lankan kingdoms. They also consisted of a variety of immigrants, including Muslims who settled in Colombo, and the descendants of the Portuguese and the Dutch, the “Burghers.” According to Roberts’ estimates, out of Colombo’s population of 31,188 in 1824, about 13,420 were M oors, 4,550 Burghers, and 2,450 Chetties; 72 including the British residents of the fort area, more than two-thirds were “nonLankans.” Until the late nineteenth century, the large majority of Colombo’s residents were not those who had migrated from inland. Both the space of Colombo and its inhabitants had been imported over the years.

By the early twentieth century, Colombo had been Ceylonized in regard to its population, through the naturalization of immigrants and migration from the interior of the country. In addition to Muslims adopting Tamil as their daily language (Arabic for prayers), caste also seeped into their communities. 73 In this way, M uslim migrants who had settled in the island only temporarily for business purposes became naturalized. Migration not only escalated between the 1880s and 1920s, increasing Colombo’s population by about 120%, but also changed the ethnic and religious composition of the city. By 1921, 47% of Colombo’s population were already Sinhalese, largely from the Low-Country, and the Sinhalese, Ceylon Tamils, and (naturalized) Ceylon M oors and Burghers made up 63% of Colombo’s population.

The influx of migrants, however, created the basis for a new type of spatial grouping in the city. The most known Tamil enclave of W ellawatta, then at the outskirts of the city as defined by municipal boundaries, had already appeared by the 1880s. 74 Migrants brought ethnically defined quarters around the British compound of the Fort. After the mid-nineteenth century, the British also developed several enclaves outside the fort, including the residential Cinnamon Gardens. By the early twentieth century, however, the Sinhalese formed the main part of the city’s population within which enclaves of other ethnicities were formed, but with more permeable boundaries. In Ceylonizing Colombo, the Low-Country Sinhalese have therefore replaced the Europeans four centuries after they had appropriated Colombo from the Muslims.

Segregation was not limited to racial and ethnic groups, but was also based on

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class, status, and income. By 1973, what the Census Department defined as “shanties” and “slums” accommodated almost half the city’s population. Yet the concentration of these in particular areas forming so-called working class neighborhoods, and their relative absence in elite and upper class suburbs, demonstrate class and income-based segregation. The expansion of the port in 1883, and its associated industries, was primarily instrumental in converting large areas, such as Kochchikade, and Gintupitiya, into dockland areas giving rise to a particular clustering of working class tenements and small businesses.75 A distinctive demographic characteristic of the colonial community, and also of the early immigrant and migrant communities in colonial port cities--as well as plantations--was the relative absence of women. 76 Cordiner notes that English society in Colombo in the 1820s consisted of one hundred “gents” and twenty “ladies.” 77 The significance of being single has been stressed from the beginning of European settlement; any Portuguese soldier who married was immediately discharged from the service. 78 This demographic aspect was accompanied by specific masculine institutions such as bachelors’ chummeries, clubs, and the allocation of disproportionate space in the city to the provision of recreational activities for the single male official. Brohier describes the club in terms of “An old adage holds that wherever two Englishmen met away from Home, they founded a “club”--in reality a nostalgic corner in a foreign field that was for ever England!” 79 The clubs were principally for men and, according to Cordiner, “ladies” did not attend the meetings of any of these societies.80 These clubs also reflected the system of social stratification and their membership was highly restricted. In regard to W hist Bungalow, which had only twelve members, they were “chosen from among the most respectable inhabitants, whose wealth or position entitled them to the highest social honours.” 81 The main component of the Ceylonese who migrated in the initial stages as also male. These men lived in small rooms in lodging houses known among immigrants from India as Kiddangies, sustained by the small shops and other marginal services which are part of the so-called informal economy of the poor. 82 In 1921, 61% of Colombo’s population was male.83 The gradual settlement of migrants in Colombo, later joined by their families, eventually feminized the city, bringing about a gender balance by the 1960s.

In addition to Ceylonizing and feminizing, migrants also nativized and ruralized Colombo. Even in what the authorities called “slum” areas of towns, attempts were made to grow one or two papaya trees around each house thereby creating the sense of a garden. 84 McGee argues that characteristics of the city such as high-fertility and the persistence of the so-called “extended-family” are simply aspects of the “ruralness” of “Third W orld” cities. 85 A common solution to the lack of affordable dwellings was the construction of single-storied, mostly detached, small housing units using less durable material. These dwellings, “shanties” in the language of planners, represented 21% of Colombo’s housing stock in 1981. 86 Building their own houses with materials available in the new environment and using self-help methods to do so represents the transfer of rural housing methods to the city. These

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buildings both helped the inhabitants to familiarize themselves with the city and, at the same time, also ruralized a part of it.

Patterns of migration and other post-colonial developments, however, blurred the urban-rural distinction. According to Moore, “The amorphousness of the ‘village’ in Sri Lanka and the lack of clear urban-rural boundaries are opposite sides of the same coin. Both are in large part due to the preference for dispersed settlement.” 87 The rural emphasis of state development policies, nationalist and socialist influences, and the conservative characteristics of the westernized have contributed to the continuation of this lack of urban-rural distinction until the late 1970s.

Urban Problems and Planning Solutions From the late 1910s, Colombo Municipal authorities began to stereotype the poor migrants in Colombo. The housing and landscapes they produced were seen by the authorities as “unhealthy,” “overcrowded,” and undesirable for living. The enactment of the Housing Ordinance of 1915 made municipal authorities view the city as plagued with urban and housing problems. As an exported discourse, the urban problems the municipal authorities found in Colombo did not differ much from what the authorities in M anchester and London had found in those cities. The difference is that Colombo’s problems were new and the means to perceive those were exported to Colombo only in the first decades of the twentieth century.

As a result, colonial planners, such as Patrick Geddes, Clifford Holliday, and Patrick Abercrombie, were invited from the metropole to solve these problems. It was within these planning proposals that “town planning” developed and took root in Ceylon. This led to the establishment of the Town Planning Department as a national planning agency, with colonialism being the vehicle by which urban planning was exported to Ceylon.

As the building of cities and urban and rural institutions go far back in history, urban and regional planning, broadly defined as “environmental decision making,” is clearly not a new phenomenon. The history of urban planning in any society, therefore, demonstrates a long continuity, in terms of emerging ideas of social policy, social and cultural values--the distribution of power and the development of political institutions--between an age when there was no governmental responsibility for “Town Planning” described as such and a period when there was.88 Yet in Sri Lanka, these two stages were ruptured by colonialism.

Governmental responsibility for, and how to understand and manage towns were also taught by colonial officials who built them in the first place, thus subjugating Lankan urban history to a British colonial one.

Ceylonese Adaption of Colonial Architecture and the Landscape As both town planning, the field of post-colonial architecture had its roots in the late colonial period, and was marked by the continuation of colonial practices. Yet unlike with planning, the development of so-called “Modern Architecture”

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transplanted hegemony in architecture from individual metropoles to a broader Euro-American core. This discourse provided a culturally neutral context for a continuing dependency on the imperial metropoles well into the post-colonial period. I shall focus here on the process of the Ceylonese elite penetration of colonial landscapes, and explore the post-colonial architecture of Ceylon.

The manifestation of a distinct cultural expression in architecture was not an issue of any significance for Ceylon’s post-colonial rulers. The immediate postindependence period was marked by drives for “development” and “modernization,” still following the model of Europe. Architecturally, the same process had enabled “architectural modernism” to climax in such “Third W orld” cities as Brasilia and Chandigarh. Modernization was thus part of the post-colonial phase of the “W esternization” of society and space and, from a nationalist point of view, this minimized the need for institutional and spatial change.

Ceylonese leaders who continued to rule the country within the British-made constitution of 1947 were quite at home adopting the symbols of the colonial elite.

They thus moved into former colonial spaces, reinventing their own identity, and re-interpreting these spaces as those of their own nation. The colonial fort area, where the colonial military and administrative apparatuses had long been located, came to be identified simply as “Fort,” or Colombo Fort, a politically neutral name.

However, when national leaders had political power in their hands, they rapidly Ceylonized the government sector and its built environment. The “Neo-Classical” parliament house, built by the British, was transformed from its status of State Council building to the House of Representatives and Secretariat. The building itself was not changed, but the processional way and council chamber were altered to accommodate more elected representatives.89 The former residence of the British Governor, the Queen’s House, was occupied by the new Governor-General, the ceremonial head of the state representing the Queen. The colonial built environment of the Fort area, therefore, did not change for three decades after independence.

The elite followed the late colonial model of living in residential suburbs.

Colonial living styles had been of particular interest to the nascent elite from Dutch times. Dutch country houses built to the north of Colombo, near Kelani River, attracted the so-called “leading citizens” to Mutuwal, Hultsdorp, and Grandpass, and remained a socially preferred location until the mid-nineteenth century. Later, British residential neighborhoods to the south of the fort area, in Kollupitiya, and later, Cinnamon Gardens, set a new trend for the Ceylonese elite to follow. 90 W ith independence, they moved into the Cinnamon Gardens area in much larger numbers.

These housing and locational choices were part of a broader emulation of British colonial culture, which also included eating habits, dress, consumerism, and even naming practices. The city of Colombo, and Cinnamon Gardens in particular, became one of the prime sites for symbolic display. According to Roberts, the construction of palatial mansions with neat driveways and gardens was just as much a part of this status competition as forms of elegant dress, profligate wedding

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receptions, and the use of material artifacts of W estern origin. Conspicuous consumption for symbolic purposes was played out through material forms.91 As Abu-Lughod argues in regard to M orocco, “the elite had moved into the vacuum left by the foreign caste, and the privileges that accrued to these positions so newly occupied were dependent in part upon maintaining the system that had created them.” 92 Although the physical-spatial forms of colonial urban development apparently strained the economic resources of the city,93 the elite’s ambition was clearly to occupy colonial spaces. Post-colonial cities largely retained their former patterns of spatial stratification, 94 although the boundaries were less rigid. Racial inequality built into the colonial urban form was now reproduced within the postcolonial spheres of status and class.

The continuation of the colonial administrative structure also required spaces to house both post-colonial activities and subjects. Adaptation of the colonial categorization of government servants, providing them with quarters with largely the same facilities, is evident in the Report of the Committee Appointed to Advise on the Type Plans of Quarters for Government Officers of 1952. Although the committee noted post-colonial realities, such as the expense of maintaining detached houses for higher ranking officers with a garden close to the work place in Colombo and the furnishing of these, the actual provision of quarters was not questioned.95 Its recommendations, rather, aimed at reducing the cost of housing for the lower ranks of government servants, providing them with flats (apartment housing) and reducing internal areas below the minimum requirements specified in the Housing Ordinance. The committee, advised by (British) Government Architect, T.N. W ynne Jones--who had designed grand “Neo-Classical” buildings in Colombo--did not place value in what it called “conventional features in building,” “such as extensive overhang of eaves, high valleys, embellishments, broken outlines, and mouldings” and recommended avoiding such “non-essentials.” 96 It was not therefore so much the structure that was at issue, but the cost and subsidies for lowranking government workers.

These modified colonial building practices also required architects capable of producing them. From about the 1930s, compliant Ceylonese were trained in the metropole; the Commonwealth also increased the capacity for post-colonial subjects to travel to other Dominions to study architecture. These Ceylonese professionals also studied the same material, culture, and history as their British predecessors had done so that their products hardly transformed the colonial landscape. Although Ceylonese architects gradually replaced the British, therefore, the PW D-based structure of architectural production largely continued to dominate in the postcolonial period.

Just like the production of architecture itself, the centralization of production of architectural knowledge in the institutions of the metropole tended not only to homogenize the landscape across the Empire, but also to obscure what we might call “national” (or proto-national) cultural expressions. From a core-periphery perspective, Goonatilake has argued that so-called significant knowledge assertions

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in the dependent periphery resulted from the diffusion of ideas of the center, in which the fundamental and basic core knowledge grows largely in the “W est.” 97 Holding on to the production of architectural knowledge, major schools of architecture in the core states reproduced the former colonial monopoly on architectural production, but on a global scale. For the professionals in the periphery, therefore, the production of “meaningful architecture” was largely guided by the process of mimicking W estern buildings and architectural styles. The metropole-colony dependency was thus carried over by the post-colonial state, its departments, and its professionals. Architects educated in the metropole formed, as a club, the Ceylon Institute of Architects in 1957. Decentralizing the diffusion of architectural knowledge, this institution introduced architectural education into Ceylon in 1961. Yet not only was its curriculum fashioned after the British model but, until the 1980s, a representative from the Royal Institute of British Architects sat on the final design review committee.

At the same time, a long standing process among European architects of referring back to classical buildings in search of styles was profoundly challenged from the 1920s under the rubric of “Modernism.” The ideology of what might be called “architectural modernism” was produced in Europe under the leadership of the Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne (CIAM). 98 W hat is significant to this discussion is that, breaking away from one kind of European history, architectural modernists projected a new future, an alternative to historic architecture as well as the industrial city. In the second place, the development of building typologies and planning conventions were projected as instruments of change, and seen as particularly useful in redefining the social functions of urban organization. Moreover, the CIAM’s view relied on the state’s authority to achieve the planning goals of the city. The leading figure of CIAM, Le Corbusier, claimed that radical social change could be brought about through this new architecture without social revolution, an appeal which attracted both revolutionaries as well as their opponents.

These ideas were in keeping with the wishes of most post-colonial leaders whose objective was to use the post-colonial state as an instrument of change in constructing a modern nation. Furthermore, architectural modernism called for massive state intervention and centralized coordination,99 and this certainly appealed to post-colonial states which undertook the task of “development” in place of private capital. Moreover, CIAM’s projection of a common future, with no reference to previous forms of European architecture, tended to underplay the cultural context in which this ideology was produced. It was this de-historicization of architecture and the aesthetics of erasure, particularly the capacity to represent a future outside both colonial and “pre-colonial” histories, that made the adoption of modernism more comfortable for post-colonial architects. The representation of architectural modernism as a thrust towards, and an image of, progress made it even more attractive to the post-colonial political leadership. This is evident in Nehru’s employment of Le Corbusier as the architect-planner of independent India’s first significant city building project, Chandigarh.100

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The only reference in the modernist discourse to distinctive and a particular place was found in the notion of “Tropical Architecture,” discussed in Chapter Three. This suggests that architectural modernism was not just European, but was also constructed within the premises of Eurocentrism, undermining the social and cultural values of non-European people, and recognizing only a climatic difference in relation to temperate Europe. Moreover, the notion of “Tropical Architecture” was based on an assumption that the indigenous architectures of newly independent states were “decadent,” “moribund,” and devoid of a living history. 101 It claimed that modernism was of value in the production of “more efficient” buildings for the “Tropics.” Its momentum was towards the homogenization, standardization, and rationalization of the building process, opening up overseas markets for building material and component producers of the metropole.

The decentralization of the design process, therefore, did not produce much diversity in the post-colonial landscape. If Ceylonese architects were ambiguous about post-colonial architecture and the relevance of so-called Gothic or NeoClassical buildings in Colombo, architectural modernism provided a spuriously “neutral” terrain for the transfer of architectural ideas from the centers to the peripheries. W ithin the budgetary constraints of post-colonial states, there also seemed to be a belief that “ornament” is costly. Despite the cost of construction and maintenance, modernist buildings were perceived as cheap to construct, and the hegemony of “Modern Architecture” became strong in post-colonial Ceylon. The main institutional buildings that appeared in Colombo until the 1970s, for example, the Central Bank of Ceylon, the Irrigation Department Headquarters, Ceylinco Building, St. Thomas’s Primary School (Kollupitiya), Peoples Bank headquarters, were all designed in the so-called “modernist” mode.

In brief, the colonial society and space in Ceylon was not subjected to any qualitative change immediately after independence. The colonial ideological foundation within which cities had been built, and which provided the necessary knowledge to understand, manage, and maintain the extant built environment, persisted during the first decade after independence. The process of independence largely took the form of indigenizing colonial social and spatial structures.

Notes 1. Immanuel Wallerstein, “The Three Instances of Hegemony in the History of the Capitalist World-Economy,” ch. in Politics of the World-Economy: The States, the Movements, and the Civilizations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 46; Giovanni Arrighi, “The Three Hegemonies,” 396.

2. “a situation of total and apparently irremediable lack of organization.” (Arrighi, 369) 3. Terence K. Hopkins, “Note on the concept of Hegemony” Review xiii (1990): 409-412.

4. Hugh Tinker, Separate and Unequal: India and the Indians in the British Commonwealth 1920-1950 (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1976), 36, 355-6.

5. See P.K.S. Namboodiri, J.P. Anand, and Sreedhar, Interventions in the Indian Ocean (New Delhi: ABC Publishing House, 1982), 2-3.

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6. Tinker, Separate and Unequal, 264-5.

7. H. Duncan Hall, Commonwealth: A History of the British Commonwealth of Nations (London: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1971).

8. Robert H. Jackson, Quasi-States: Sovereignty, International Relations, and the Third World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 98.

9. See Fanon, 52.

10. de Silva, A History of Sri Lanka, 287-8. The Ceylonese also invested in rubber, making it fairly evenly owned between the Europeans and the Ceylonese.

11. de Silva, A History of Sri Lanka, 162; I.D.S. Weerawardana, Government and Politics in Ceylon (1931-1946) (Colombo: Ceylon Economic Research Association, 1951), 3; Mills, Ceylon Under British, 105, 107, 266; Michael Roberts, Caste Conflict and Elite Formation: The Rise of the Karava Elite in Sri Lanka, 1500-1931 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 2, 166, 168.

12. Marshall R. Singer, The Emerging Elite (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1964), 120.

13. Peebles, “Governor Arthur Gordon,” 102.

14. S.J. Tambiah, “Ethnic Population,” 113, 117.

15. Singer, 75.

16. Hugh Tinker, South Asia. A Short History (London: MacMillan, 1989), 163.

17. See James S. Duncan, “The Power of Place in Kandy: 1780-1980,” in John A. Agnew and James S. Duncan, eds., The Power of Place: Bringing Together Geographical and Sociological Imaginations (Winchester, MA: Unwin Hyman, 1989), 191.

18. In de Silva, A History of Ceylon, 327.

19. Michael Roberts, “Problems of Social Stratification and the Demarcation of National and Local Elites in British Ceylon,” Journal of Asian Studies xxxiii (1974): 558.

20. Singer, 118-9.

21. Tinker, Separate and Unequal, 156.

22. For a critical appraisal of the concept of “post-colonial,” see McClinntock, “The Angel of Progress;” Shohat, “Notes on the “Post-Colonial.”

23. In conceptualizing globalization, Robertson refers to similar implications of various groups becoming conscious of the world becoming a single place. (Globalization) 24. Weerawardana, 15.

25. Steven Kemper, The Presence of the Past: Chronicles, Politics, and Culture in Sinhala Life (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991), 142; Elizabeth Nissan, “History in the Making: Anuradhapura and the Sinhala Buddhist Nation” Social Analysis: Journal of Cultural and Social Practice 25 (September 1989): 64-77.

26. Tinker, South Asia, 118. Italics mine.

27. See, Michael Roberts, “Irrigation Policy in British Ceylon During the Nineteenth Century,” South Asia 2 (1972): 48.

28. Roberts, “Irrigation Policy,” 51.

29. Land Commissioner’s Department, Statistical Information of the Human Settlement Schemes Under the Land Commissioner’s Department, 1981; R.D. Wanigaratne, The Minipe Colonization Scheme: An Appraisal (Colombo: Agrarian Research and Training Institute, 1979), 47; G. Gunatillake, Participatory Development and Dependence: The Case of Sri Lanka (New York: Overseas Development Council, 1980), table 7.4.

30. In Farmer, 163. Italics mine.

31. Sarath Amunugama, “A Recent Attempt at Colonization on a Peasant Framework” Ceylon Journal of Historical and Social Studies 8 (1965): 134.

32. Farmer 113; Wanigaratne, 50.

33. Farmer, “The Origins of Agricultural Colonization,” 233, 234.

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34. Wanigaratne, 48, 50.

35. Farmer, “The Origins of Agricultural Colonization,” 234.

36. See Amunugama, 131, 134.

37. Amunugama, 133; Roberts, “Irrigation Policy,” 59. See also Wanigaratne, 1; Farmer, “The Origins of Agricultural Colonization,” 233-4; Marguerite S. Robinson, Political Structure in a Changing Singhalese Village (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 260.

38. Wickramasinghe, 250; Amunugama, 139, 143; Robinson, 260-1.

39. Farmer, “The Origins of Agricultural Colonization,” 231; Wanigaratne, 47-9.

40. See Mick Moore, The State and Peasant Policies in Sri Lanka (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 218.

41. See Richard Gombrich and Gananath Obeyesekere, Buddhism Transformed: Religious Change in Sri Lanka (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), 447-8.

42. See Bertolacci, A View of the Agricultural, Commercial and Financial Interests of Ceylon, 24, 45; Major Forbes, Eleven Years in Ceylon. two vols. (Weatmead: Gregg International Publishers, 1972 [1840]), 63-5; Tilak Hettiarachchi, The Sinhala Peasant in a Changing Society: Ecological Change Among the Sinhala Peasants from 1796 A.D. to 1909 A.D. (Colombo: Lake House, 1982), 87-8.

43. J.W. Bennett, Ceylon and Its Capabilities (London: W.H. Allen, 1843) and Tennent’s reports of 1846 and 1847, cited in Roberts, “Irrigation Policy”, 48-9.

44. Bernard Cohen, “History and Anthropology: The State of Play,” ch. in An Anthropologist Among the Historians and Other Essays (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1987), 44.

45. de Silva, A History of Sri Lanka, 298.

46. Ibid, 299-300; Michael Roberts, “The Paddy Lands Irrigation Ordinances and the Revival of Traditional Irrigation Customs, 1856-1871,” Ceylon Journal of Historical and Social Studies 10 (1967): 129-30.

47. In 1861, three choices were given to the proprietors of each irrigation division: that of gamsabhava only, village headman only, or gamsabhavas in combination with headmen.

While Northern Province favored headmen untrammeled by councils and Eastern Province preferred gamsabhavas only, the rest of the provinces picked the combined option. (Roberts, “The Paddy Lands,” 121) 48. Roberts “The Paddy Lands,” 117.

49. Mills, Ceylon Under British, 261.

50. Andrew Boyd, “A People's Tradition: An Account of the Small Peasant Tradition in Ceylon,” Marg 1 (1947): 26, 28-9.

51. See de Vos, “Some Aspects of Traditional Rural Housing,” 16; Census, 1981.

52. See James S. Duncan, “Getting Respect in the Kandyan Highlands: The Home, The Community, and the Self in a Third World Society,” in Setha Low and Erve Chambers, eds., Housing, Culture, and Design: A Comparative Perspective (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989), 229-250.

53. See MacDougall, 1971.

54. Bandaranayake, “Form and Technique in Traditional Rural Housing,” 11.

55. Amos Rapoport, “Vernacular Architecture and the Cultural Determinants of Form,” in Anthony D. King, ed., Buildings and Society, 292.

56. Anthony D. King, “Rethinking Colonialism: An Epilogue,” in Nezar AlSayyad, ed., Forms of Dominance: On the Architecture and Urbanism of the Colonial Enterprise (Aldershot: Avebury, 1992), 348.

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57. See Brohier, Links Between Sri Lanka and the Netherlands, 93, 94, 97; Tinker, South Asia, 85; de Silva and Beumer, 118; Hulugalle, The Centenary Volume, 22.

58. Coomaraswami, Medieval Singhalese Art, 257.

59. Brohier, Links Between Sri Lanka and the Netherlands, 92 60. See G. Kalaeswaran, A Study of Traditional Domestic Architecture of Jaffna up to ‘Colonial-Influenced’ House (M.Sc. Thesis, University of Moratuwa, 1983).

61. Percival, 173.

62. Coomaraswami, 31.

63. Evenson, 71. See also Clifford, The Predicament of Culture.

64. Ferguson, 9; Hulugalle, Centenary Volume, 68.

65. Roberts, “Colombo in the Round,” 4. According to Turner, the population of Colombo in 1921 was 244,000, while the next, Jaffna had only 42,400. Galle’s population was 39,100, while Kandy’s was 32,600. (Turner, 4) 66. Knox and Agnew, 247.

67. Michael Roberts, Ismeth Rahim, and Percy Colin-Thome, People In Between: The Burghers and the Middle Class in the Transition Within Sri Lanka 1790s-1960s (Colombo: Sarvodaya, 1989), I: 104; Kumari Jayawardena, The Rise of the Labor Movement in Ceylon (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1972).

68. See Chandra, “Colonialism.”

69. Turner, 4.

70. See de Silva, A History of Sri Lanka, 408.

71. See Perera, “Exploring Colombo.”

72. Roberts, “Colombo in the Round,” 5.

73. Azeez, “The Muslims of Sri Lanka,” 13-14.

74. Roberts, “Colombo in the Round,” 5, 17.

75. Roberts, “Colombo in the Round,” 9.

76. King, Urbanism, Colonialism and the World-Economy, 35.

77. Cordiner, 76. See also Roberts, “Colombo in the Round,” 6.

78. Brohier, Changing Face of Colombo, 14.

79. Ibid, 47.

80. Cordiner, 77-9.

81. Brohier, Changing Face of Colombo, 47.

82. Roberts et al, 106.

83. Roberts, “Colombo in the Round,” 5-6.

84. Morrison, et al, 24.

85. McGee, The Urbanization Process, 55.

86. Marga, 59.

87. Moore, 126.

88. King, “Exporting Planning,” 13.

89. Lakshman Alwis, Rohan C. Aluwihare, and Dayapriya B. Navaratne, British Period Architecture in Sri Lanka (Colombo: Sri Lanka United Kingdom Society, 1992), 60.

90. Hulugalle, Colombo, 143, 144.

91. Roberts, “Colombo in the Round,” 14-15.

92. Janet Abu-Lughod, “Dependent Urbanism and decolonization: The Moroccan Case” ASQ 1,1: 54.

93. See King, Colonial Urban Development, 284.

94. See Abu-Lughod, 60; Hugh Tinker, Race in the Third World City (New York: Ford Foundation, 1971).

122

Indigenizing Space

95. Ceylon Government, Report of the Committee Appointed to Advise on the Type Plans of Quarters for Government Officers (Colombo: Government Publication Bureau, 1952), 1,2.

96. Ibid, 4.

97. Susantha Goonatilake, Aborted Discovery: Science and Creativity in the Third World (London: Zed Books Ltd, 1984), 110-111.

98. A cogent examination of architectural modernism is found in James Holston, The Modernist City: An Anthropological Critique of Brasilia (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1989).

99. Ibid, 5.

100. See Ravi Kalia, Chandigarh: In Search of an Identity (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1987).

101. Shanti Jayawardana, â&#x20AC;&#x153;Bawa: A contribution to cultural regeneration,â&#x20AC;? Mimar 19 (JanMar 1986): 48.