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The Ideological History of the Sri Lankan ‘Peasantry’

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 November 2008

Mick Moore
Mick Moore
Affiliation:
Institute of Development Studies at the University of Sussex
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Extract

The Sri Lankan rural economy has long been categorized into a plantation sector producing tea, rubber and some coconuts for export, and a smallholder sector producing mainly food, especially rice, for domestic consumption. While incomplete, this dichotomy is still usable. One of the significant features of Sri Lankan rural history over the past half century has been a partial transfer of tea and rubber production from the plantation sector to the smallholder sector. In this and in related respects the traditional plantation-smallholder dichotomy has been weakening. Yet in another important respect there has been no convergence between the two sectors. The plantation sector has remained fully capitalist in the commonsense meaning of that term, while capitalist relations of production appear to have made few further inroads into the smallholder sector. True that a great deal of the labour used in smallholder production is hired. But that has long been the case. The evidence suggests that since World War Two the small family farm has at least held its own as the dominant form under which land is owned and managed. This has happened despite rapid population growth on a terrain already densely populated.

Type
Research Article
Information
Modern Asian Studies , Volume 23 , Issue 1 , February 1989 , pp. 179 - 207
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1989

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References

* This paper is in part both a condensation and an expansion of arguments found in Moore, M., The State and Peasant Politics in Sri Lanka (Cambridge, 1985). Evidence may be found there for points made here in a rather sweeping fashion. I am grateful to James Brow and Jo Weeramunda for comments on an earlier version. The tentative nature of my own commitment to the interpretations put forward here should make clear that I implicate no one but myself.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

1 See Moore, State and Peasant Politics, esp. pp. 22–4 and 65–73.Google Scholar

2 Census of Population, 1971, vol. 2, pt 1: Table 4; and Census of Population and Housing, 1981, Preliminary Release no. 1: Table 2.Google Scholar

3 Census of Ceylon, 1953, vol. 4, pt I: Table 3;Google ScholarCensus of Population, 1963, vol. 2, pt 1: Table 2;Google ScholarCensus of Population 1971, vol. 2, pt 2: Table 9;Google Scholarand Census of Population and Housing, 1981, Preliminary Release no. 4: Table 12. Here as elsewhere in this paper the occupational rather than the industrial classification of the workforce is used. In the case of agriculture the two are virtually identical.Google Scholar

4 The proportion of the total agricultural labour force recorded as paid employees declined from 57% in 1953 (Census of Ceyon, 1953, vol. 4, pt 1. The Gainfully Employed Population: Table 5) to 45% in 1981 (Census of Population and Housing, 1981, Preliminary Release no. 4. The Economically Active Population. Tables Based on a Ten Percent Sample: Table 9).Google Scholar

5 See Moore, M., ‘The State and the Peasantry in Sri Lanka’ (D. Phil. thesis, University of Sussex, 1981), pp. 382–3.Google Scholar

6 See Moore, State and Peasant Politics, pp. 186–7. There is a similar tendency, relevant to the main theme of this paper, for rural dwellers to exaggerate the importance of rice compared to other crops in the provision of employment and income. Ibid, pp. 86–8.

7 The figures on the number of smallholdings are from Census of Agriculture, 1982. Smallholding Sector, Preliminary Report: Table 4. The population growth rate figures are from Census of Population and Housing, 1981, Preliminary Release no. 2, Population Tables Based on a Ten Percent Sample: Table A.

8 To save space the relevant table is not reproduced here.

9 See Moore, State and Peasant Politics, esp. pp. 22–4, 87–8, 134–40, 141–66, and 182–8;Google Scholar and Moore, M. ‘Deficit Paddy Farming in Sri Lanka’, Sri Lanka Journal of Agrarian Studies, 1, 2 (1980).Google Scholar

10 A similar problematique features prominently in the only substantial published work examining ‘the agrarian question’ in Sri Lanka from a Marxian perspective—Abeysekera, C. (ed.), Capital and Peasant Production. Studies in the Continuity and Discontinuity of Agrarian Structures in Sri Lanka (Social Scientists' Association, Colombo, 1985).Google Scholar

11 State and Peasant Politics, passim.

12 The relationship between welfare policies and the lack of emigration from rural areas is explored in Gunatilleke, G., ‘The Rural–Urban Balance and Development— The Experience of Sri Lanka’, Marga 2, 1 (1980).Google Scholar

13 See Moore, ‘The State and the Peasantry in Sri Lanka’, p. 250.Google Scholar

14 In 1962, 29% of all land operators declared non-agricultural activities to be their main source of income, and a further 16% admitted to supplementary non-agricultural earnings. These figures are likely to be underestimates (Census of Agriculture, 1962, vol. 1, Agricultural Land, Agricultural Operations and Tenure: Table 1).Google Scholar

15 The standard size of allotment has declined from 5 acres of paddy land and 4 acres of highland in the 1930s to 2½ acres of paddy land and ½ acre of highland today.

16 See Moore, State and Peasant Politics, pp. 85–106.Google Scholar

17 Ibid.

18 See Moore, M. and Perera, U. L. J., ‘Land Policy and Village Expansion in Sri Lanka’, Marga 5, 1 (1978).Google Scholar

19 See Ministry of Lands and Land Development, Resource Development, 1978–1982. Administration Report (Colombo, 1983).Google Scholar

20 Census of Agriculture, 1982, Smallholding Sector, Preliminary Report: Table 2.

21 See Moore, State and Peasant Politics, ch. 5, esp. p. 88.Google Scholar

22 For a more detailed elaboration on the context and content of the myth see ibid., esp. pp. 27–9, 36–8, 44–8, 53–63, 66–83, 117–19, and 243–7.

23 In reality I refer to ‘the political class ’—the category of Sri Lankans, almost all from elite backgrounds, who have occupied almost all leading political positions from the 1930s to the present day.

24 Because of the increasing ferocity of Sinhalese-Tamil communal conflict, an increasing amount of work has been done by liberal and progressive Sri Lankan scholars to expose the way in which these kinds of ideas have developed and been incorporated into history, written and unwritten, official and unofficial. See especially the papers by Bandaranayake, Goonatileke, Gunawardena and Siriweera in Social Scientists' Association, Ethnicity and Social Change in Sri Lanka. Paper Presented at a Seminar Organized by the Social Scientists Association, December 1979 (Colombo, 1984).Google Scholar

25 The temple is normatively incomple without the dagoba—the rounded structure supporting the stupa in which Buddha relics are housed. Jonathan Spencer (private communication) relates how, when asked to draw a picture of their village, the school children in the locality in which he did field research almost universally turned in a picture which included paddy fields, an irrigation tank and a temple with a dagoba—and this despite the facts that the village irrigation tank had only very recently been constructed, and that the village temple had no dagoba.

26 See Lanka Guardian (Colombo), vol. 6, no. 16, 15 12 1983, p. 24.Google Scholar

27 See Jiggins, J., Caste and Family in the Politics of the Sinhalese 1947–1976 (Cambridge, 1979), p. III.Google Scholar

28 See Moore, State and Peasant Politics, pp. 68–73.Google Scholar

29 Ibid, pp. 243–7.

30 Samaraweera, V., ‘Land, Labour, Capital and Sectional Interests in the National Politics of Sri Lanka’, Modern Asian Studies 15, 1 (1981).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

31 Meyer, Eric, in a personal communication, has informed me of the rapidity of this change in Senanayake's views.Google Scholar

32 The term ‘Low Country’ refers to the southwestern coastal plain north and (mainly) south of Colombo. For a discussion of the crucial role of the more educationally and commercially developed Low Country population in shaping the agenda of Sri Lankan politics over the past century see Moore, State and Peasant Politics, pp. 126–39, and ch. 10.Google Scholar

33 Ibid., pp. 68–72.

34 Ibid., pp. 46–8 and 169–75.

35 See Jupp, J.. Sri Lanka: Third World Democracy (London, 1978), ch. 7.Google Scholar

36 See Huntington, S. P., Political Order in Changing Societies (New Haven and London, 1968), pp. 438 and 451.Google Scholar

37 See Bandaranaike, S. W. R. D., Towards a New Era. Selected Speeches of S. W. R. D. Bandaranaike Made in the Legislature of Ceylon, 1931–1959 (Colombo, 1961), p. 891.Google Scholar

38 Ibid., pp. 880–4.

39 Hansard, vol. 30, 6 03 1958, p. 3891.Google Scholar

40 Sri Lanka News, 27 December 1984, pp. 6–7.Google Scholar

41 Hettiarachchy, T., The Sinhala Peasant in a Changing Society (Colombo, 1982).Google Scholar

42 The notion of ‘disintegration’ has been prominent in contemporary sociological analysis of rural Sri Lanka. See especially Sarkar, N. K. and Thambaiyah, S. J., The Disintegrating Village (Colombo, 1957);Google Scholar and Morrison, B.Moore, M. and Lebbe, M. U. Ishak (eds), The Disintegrating Village. Social Change in Rural Sri Lanka. (Colombo, 1979).Google Scholar

43 Hettiarachchy, The Sinhala Peasant, p. 1.Google Scholar

44 Ibid.

45 Ibid. pp. 5–6, p. 29 and p. 40.

46 Ibid. p. 20 and p. 31.

47 Ibid. pp. 11–12 and pp. 18–19.

48 Ibid. p. 20.

49 Ibid., p. 16.

50 Ibid. p. 9.

51 Ibid. pp. 39–40.

52 Ibid. pp. 35–6.

53 Ibid., p. 27.

54 Ibid. chs 2 and 3.

55 Ibid. p. 55, 59, 65–6 and 88.

56 Ibid. p. 57.

57 Ibid. p. 63.

58 Ibid. p. 64.

59 Ibid. p. 119.

60 Ibid. pp. 105–6.

61 Ibid. ch. 4.

62 Ibid. p. 97.

63 Ibid. pp. 123–4.

64 Gunawardena, R. A. L. H., ‘The People of the Lion. Sinhala Consciousness in History and Historiography’, in Social Scientists' Association, Ethnicity and Social Change, p. 33.Google Scholar

65 My own experience indicates that this is especially common outside the boundaries of official colonization schemes. Tractor owners can encroach in and cultivate relatively large areas of unallocated common land. Within colonization schemes there are substantial constraints on land accumulation by tractor owners. See Farrington, J. and Abeyratne, F., ‘Farm Power in Sri Lanka’, University of Reading, Department of Agricultural Economics and Management, Development Study No. 22 (Reading, 1982), Appendix 5.4.Google Scholar

66 See Moore, State and Peasant Politics, ch. 7.

67 Ibid. pp. 208–9.

68 In the early 1980s the government initiated a programme to convert Crown leasehold into outright ownership.

69 See Moore, State and Peasant Politics, pp. 62–3.Google Scholar

70 Ibid. pp. 53–63.

71 Ibid. pp. 90–113.

72 Ibid. ch. 5.

73 This is the central theme of Moore, The State and Peasant Politics.

74 Abercrombie, N.et al., The Dominant Ideology Thesis (London, 1980);Google ScholarSkocpol, T., States and Social Revolutions (Cambridge, 1979), pp. 168–71.CrossRefGoogle Scholar