3: european cultural hegemony

61

3A Single World-Economy and Eurocentric

Culture: The Integration of Ceylon intoEuropean 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 Wallerstein, 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. The incorporation thus required the building of institutions and spaces1

in new zones which were compatible with those of the larger world-economy and

the necessary links between these. Ceylon was incorporated into the world-

economy 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

62 Incorporating Ceylon

effects of Europeanization. Moreover, the production, legitimation, and circulation2

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 World-Economy

Until the 1830s, Ceylon was not an integral part of the European world-

economy. 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 West 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 world-

economy by the 1850s. Import duties in the United Kingdom had earlier favored

the West Indies; while the general duty on coffee was 9d, West 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

Incorporating Ceylon 63

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. In Tennent’s words,5

[the] experiment ... inaugurated in the Kandyan highlands ... within less than aquarter of a century has effected an industrial revolution in the island, convertingCeylon from a sluggish military cantonment into an enterprising British colony, andtransforming 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, and7

by restructuring, emerged as the dominant element of the Ceylonese economy, vis-

a-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. This encouragement of civil8

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


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

“Uncultivated” 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 9-

10% 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


emphasized the extreme reluctance on the part of British banks and agency houses

managing plantations to extend credit to the Ceylonese. In his critical essays to13

the Ceylon Observer, George Wall, 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.” According to Ralph Pieris,16

“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.” Since “Service holdings could as a rule17

be abandoned by those who wished to be free of onerous rajakariya,” the service18

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. The revolt was, therefore, largely aimed19

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. When 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


those on the home gardens of the peasants, to which they gave priority. Planter and

one-time Assistant Colonial Secretary, P.E. Wodehouse, 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.” What these attitudes reveal21

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 asa sign of modernity, or as a means to more efficient production. The Westernerthinking about economic affairs in an Oriental setting cannot too often rememberthat, 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 1834-

37 a “specialist tropical agriculturist,” R.B. Tyler, introduced the so-called

“Jamaican methods” of coffee planting in Ceylon. Moreover, new approaches to24

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


prohibition on civil servants owning plantations, resulted in a large number of

estates changing hands, and producing a new breed of private proprietors. This26

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. In short, “the problems of the planter came to be28

regarded as synonymous with those of the country,” and the economy with society.29

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 world-

economy. 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,


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. Attempts to stop what the planter saw as “encroachments” by the30

Kandyans led to serious unrest which culminated in a major revolt in 1848. The31

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. The Colombo-Kandy axis, which had represented political33

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 north-

western 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. According to the estimates of the Colombo Observer, twenty five34

percent of immigrants died during the period between 1841 to 1849, totaling as

many as 70,000 persons. Although these estimates were challenged, the graveness35

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 Matale.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. From the beginning of the twentieth century,37

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. According to Meyer, however, the estate was never a self-38

contained kingdom where planters could rule, uncontested, over the labor force,

since they were neither slaves nor indentured laborers in the conventional sense.39


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 culture-

specific forms known as bungalows. These represented the high standard of living40

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. Individually located on spacious sites, they were built for the41

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 self-

provisioning, and little attention was paid to drainage, ventilation, and privacy.43

Without 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 World-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. They were part45

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


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. The planters were thus in a position to replace the cash crop46

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. Rubber exports47

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. In Ceylon,49

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 West

Indies, West 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


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. These names, often derived from British places, monarchs, members52

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. Space and place were thus relocated within a European53

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 Western

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; the knowledge on55

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. European powers have thus56

colonized the mind in addition to the body. In this process, Eurocentrism presents57

itself as universalist for it claims that imitation of the Western 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. For Nandy, colonization is “objectification,”58

and Western 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


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

West 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. The diffusion of urban63

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. Along with schools of tropical medicine, courses on “tropical architecture”64

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, Max Weber notes that “only

in the West 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. In this singular system of production66

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 Western 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


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. With progress becoming an irrefutable, universal truth, the

primacy of economics would be instrumental in replacing ethics with reason. This67

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

Western 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. Instead, what the68

Sinhalese have are legendary tales. The first modern compilation of Sri Lankan69

Tamil history, the Yalpana Vaipava-Malai, was also written in 1736 at the initiative

of a Dutch official administering Jaffna. One after the other, British writers70

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. What 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.” This would both facilitate the employment of Ceylonese in the71

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.


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. By 1835 there73

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.” Institutions such as education and religion provided the74

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. Kandy75

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


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. This was76

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.” Henry W. Cave described it as “a spot on which converge the steamships78

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. This had a80

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.


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.

With 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 Municipal 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.” By the end of82

the century most former Dutch buildings had already disappeared “giving place to

colossal houses of business befitting the dignity of the port.” The extent of early83

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


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--Manchester, 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. In the86

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

With 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. Urwick, who visited Nuwara Eliya in the late 1870s, commented88


FIGURE 3.3 Space in time: Nuwara Eliya hill station.

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.” Although the “ice” that could complete the ambience was absent, the89

piercing cold wind frequently complained of in England was never felt, and the

temperature in Nuwara Eliya never approached what is called “tropical heat.” In90

short, for the British, 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. The principal house form, however, was a modified form of bungalow,91

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


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 Works, particularly for the use of civil servants. Turner wrote

in the 1920s, “Ceylon is singularly fortunate in possessing 175 rest houses.” Built93

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.

What 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. Places such as95

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. In Colombo,96

the lavish design of the clock tower, combined with a lighthouse, by the wife of

Governor Henry Ward (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


FIGURE 3.4 The triumph of Colonial time:Chatham Street clock tower, Colombo, 1850s.

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

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


FIGURE 3.5 The aura of power: Bungalows of Cinnamon Gardens and the private rickshaw inthe 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,


naming it after the British Empress, Victoria, and by selling the land around for

residential building. Further familiarizing the settlement for the colonial99

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.


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). The colonial community’s desire to102

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. Unlike their103

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 Works 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 Works Department was simultaneously a constituent

element of the larger administrative structure that held the Empire together. The105

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. (figure 3.7) As Gwendolyn Wright suggests in relation to the French106

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 Works 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. This is where the108

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


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


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,” neither British nor Lankan.112

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 Georgian 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. Yet the simultaneous need for the113

symbolic elaboration of colonial buildings created conditions for the use of some


decorative elements from Mogul buildings, giving rise to what was called an “Indo-

Saracenic” style in India between the 1860s and 1910s. Attempts to appropriate114

“native aesthetics” can also be seen in other European empires during this period,

for example the French Empire, suggesting similarities of trajectories.115

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. This is116

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, its “Georgian” style symbolically framing117

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 Museum 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.


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 ofthe 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 PressBoard, 1956), 41-2; Brohier, Lands, Maps and Surveys, 5; University of Ceylon, TheDisintegrating Village. Report of a Socio-Economic Survey Conducted by the University ofCeylon [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 theParliamentary Committee on Ceylon in 1850, in de Silva, ed., Social Policy and MissionaryOrganizations, 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 ExportEconomy in Transition (Homewood, Il: Richmond D. Irwin, 1966), 26.

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 Western architecture.

In these three chapters, I have addressed issues concerning the European-

colonial 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


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 SriLanka, 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 Surveyof Compulsory Labor Through the World (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1960), 44; R.M.A. vanZwanenberg, Colonial Capitalism and Labor in Kenya: 1919-1939 (Nairobi: East AfricanPublication Bureau, 1975), 73)

22. B.H. Farmer, Pioneer Peasant Colonization in Ceylon: A Study in Asian AgrarianProblems (London: Oxford university Press, 1957), 283.

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

24. Mills, Ceylon Under British Rule, 226-7, 237-8; Tennent, II: 20925. Tennent, II: 232-3; Mills, Ceylon Under British Rule, 22726. 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 Recruiter-

Cum-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 andchanges of climate. (Thirty Years Ago or Reminiscences of the Early Days of Coffee Plantingin Ceylon (Colombo ,1878) See also Soma Hewa, Colonialism, Tropical Disease andImperial Medicine: Rockefeller Philanthophy in Sri Lanka (Lanham, MD: University Press


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. Seealso Willis, 104; Ferguson, Ceylon in 1903, 70.

47. Willis, 59; Bandarage, 14; Alan Pim, Colonial Agricultural Production: TheContribution Made by Native Peasants and by Foreign Enterprise (London: OxfordUniversity 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 inregard 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 producedthe highest types of mankind, and within them alone can the white man live comfortablyand work effectively. There a man is encouraged to labour; for the heat is not so great asto 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


keep him alive. Nature is most bountiful, and the balmy skies make clothing and shelteralmost unnecessary. In the temperate zones, however, a man must work to live. He mustmake clothes to wear and build a roof for shelter. He must clear and till the land beforehe can secure a steady, regular livelihood.3. His harvest comes but once a year, so that he must learn to deny himself and lay bysomething for the future. He discovers that in concert with others he can do many thingswhich 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 longages becomes the civilized being which we know as the white man. (The World and ItsPeople: 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: PeterSmith, 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 Cityin South Asia: Pre-Modern and Modern (London: Curzon Press, 1980): 1-19.

88. Cave, 2.89. Urwick, 31.90. Casie Chitty, 81.


91. See Pamela Kanwar, Imperial Simla: The Political Culture of the Raj (Delhi, OxfordUniversity 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, Work-

Discipline, 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 OceanStudies” 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”; NormaEvenson, The Indian Metropolis: A View Toward the West (New Haven: Yale UniversityPress, 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.

3: european cultural hegemony

Documents

european worldeconomy

single worldeconomy

thelarger worldspace

european thought

european powers

european expansion

core european states

incorporation of new