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PUBLIC RECORD OFFICE
Reference :-
C.O.882/11
PUBLIC RECORD OFFICE, LONDON
ALLY WITHOUT PERMISSION OF THE COPYRIGHT PHOTOGRAPH—NOT TO BE REPRODUCED PHOTOGRAPHIC-
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Kandyans; wider powers of local self-government might be bestowed upon locally- elected representatives.
8. This does not purport to be an exhaustive list of possibilities. I am not, for the purposes of my present argument, concerned with their expediency, and I should not wish to be understood as advocating the adoption of any of them. I refer to them merely in support of my view that the problem, though difficult, may not be insoluble. I am not yet sufficiently acquainted with the situation to feel able to hazard a personal expression of opinion, beyond saying that, while the invasion of the Kandyan country by large and increasing numbers of non-Kandyan Sinhalese may perhaps be regarded as giving the Kandyans a claim to some special protection, the invaders also have legitimate claims to political representation which should not he ignored.
I have, &c.,
Enclosure 2 in No. 5.
H. J. STANLEY,
Governor.
Government House, Kuala Lumpur, 26th July, 1927.
MEMORANDUM.
1. A special request was addressed to me by some of the leading Kandyan Chiefs to deal with this Memorial personally. I warned them that I could not hope to do this before I left Ceylon, and further that it was probable that during the weeks immediately following my assumption of my new office in Malaya I should probably be too fully occupied for it to be possible for me to devote attention to this matter. They, none the less, reiterated their request; and I can only express my regret that such long, but quite unavoidable, delay should have occurred in the pre- paration of this Memorial for the consideration of the Governor of Ceylon, and for that of the Secretary of State.
2. I would, in the first instance, invite attention to paragraph 18 of my Confidential despatch, addressed to the Secretary of State, bearing date 20th November, 1926, in which the position of the Kandyans vis-à-vis the Low Country Sinhalese is explained in some detail. There is one point, however, upon which, I think, insufficient emphasis is laid in that despatch, and to this I would here specially direct attention.
3. The historical fact that the Kandyan Kingdom maintained its independence against all comers until early in the nineteenth century, and that it then voluntarily surrendered itself to the British ('rown, has always hulked much larger in the minds and in the memories of Kandyans than it has in the eyes of the Government of Ceylon. The latter regarded the extension of its jurisdiction from the Maritime Provinces over the Kandyan country, which comprised the rest of the Island, mainly as an event the effects of which would be unifying, inasmuch as it for the first time brought the whole of Ceylon under British rule. The Kandyans, on the other hand, alike at the time of the original surrender, after the repression of the subsequent rebellion, and 30 on up to the present time, have always been inspired by a keen sense of nationality, and have never accepted (or, indeed, until quite recently, have regarded as tenable by any reasonable person) the idea that surrender of their sovereign rights to the British Crown entailed the merging of the Kandyans into the rest of the Sinhalese The fact that the vast majority of the Low Country population of the Island.
Sinhalese are, like the Kandyans, Buddhists, and the further fact that the two peoples speak one and the same language, with only a few minor dialectic differences. are in the eyes of the Kandyan things that are purely fortuitous. They see in them nothing with power in any way to obliterate the identity of either people, to merge them into a single whole, or to wipe out the memory of their widely different history. The Low Country Sinhalese, on the contrary-at any rate so far as their political leaders and spokesmen on the platform and in the Press are concerned-have dis- played, more especially of late years, a growing impatience with Kandyan exclusive- ness; and they still attach to the title of their annual Congress, from which nowa- days, not only the Kandyans, but the Tamils also, stand aloof, the epithet "National which, in these circumstances, is an obvious misnomer. They go farther than this
* C. 23470/26: not printed.
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for, basing their claim upon the fact of their common religion, they assert the right of Low Country Sinhalese to concern themselves and actively to interfere with the control and management of the Buddhist shrines and temples in the Kandyan Provinces. This, in the estimation of the Kandyan Chiefs, is as gross an attempt to encroach upon their rights as would be the advancement of a similar claim by the people of Spain, on the ground of their common Catholicity, to control the manage- ment of the cathedrals of Portugal. These pretensions on the part of the Low Country Sinhalese, moreover,. wound the Kandyan Chiefs in a peculiarly vulnerable spot; for it must, I fear, be admitted that their control and management of the Buddhist Temporalities of the Kandyan Provinces have been, in far too many instances, hopelessly inefficient and often deplorably corrupt.
4. It has been the tendency of administrative officers and of the Government of Ceylon generally, more especially of recent years, almost completely to lose sight of the essential differences which divide the Low Country Sinhalese from their Kandyan neighbours, which differences, however, are ever present to the minds of the members of the Kandyan aristocracy. It has become our somewhat slovenly habit to class "the Sinhalese" as a single section of the population, as opposed to the Tamils; and as, since the inauguration of the first instalment of political reforms in 1909, the Low Country Sinhalese have taken a specially prominent part in political agitation and controversy, the Government of Ceylon has, almost insensibly, adopted the view of the situation with which the spokesmen of this section of the Sinhalese have familiarized it by constant reiteration. During all this time, too, the voice of the Kandyans has been unable to make itself effectively heard; and it was not until in December, 1925-within a few weeks of my assumption of the Government of Ceylon-that the Kandyan Chiefs, meeting in a conclave which they named "The Kandyan National Assembly," put forward in a formal manner a statement of their views and claims.
5. It will be convenient in this place to glance briefly at the differences which separate the Low Country Sinhalese from the Kandyans-differences which the former are eager to ignore, while the latter, at any rate, so far as they are repre- sented by the aristocracy of the country, are vividly conscious of them, and insistently claim for them full recognition by the Government.
6. The primary difference between the two sections into which the Sinhalese population of Ceylon is divided by history, by tradition, by culture and by sentiment, has its origin in the fact that the Low Countrymen of the Maritime Provinces, since early in the eighteenth century, have been continuously dominated by one or another of the nations that have played a prominent part in the European invasion of Asia. The Portuguese, the Dutch, the British have, each in turn, exercised control over the affairs and over the people of the Maritime Provinces of Ceylon, and traces of their demination are easily discernible to-day in the character, habits, mental outlook, etc.. etc., of the Low Country Sinhalese.
7. The fact that practically the whole of the Fisher" (Karawe) population of the western seaboard of Ceylon are Roman Catholics, and have been professors of that religion for several hundreds of years, is due to the invasion of Ceylon by the Portuguese in the sixteenth century; while a glance at the Ceylon Directory will show how universal, in the Maritime Provinces, was the adoption by the indigenous population of Portuguese names. With the Kandyan Kingdom of the interior of the Island the Portuguese waged frequent war with varying measures of success and failure; and in many of these campaigns they were actively aided by the Sinhalese of the Low Country. They never succeeded, however, in conquering the Kandyan Provinces, or in occupying them for any prolonged period; and the memory of this fact, and the contrast presented by the Low Country Sinhalese, whom the Portuguese subdued and dominated, and the Kandyans, whom they fought but could not finally overcome, bulks big in the imagination of the latter even to this day. The fact. moreover, that the Low Country Sinhalese repeatedly fought with and were worsted by the Kandyans of the hills, and that they even more frequently served against the Kandyans as the allies of the Portuguese and later of the British, is still remembered by the Kandyans and serves to accentuate for them the division of the Sinhalese population into two very distinct sections.
8. The domination of the Maritime Provinces by the Dutch, from early in the seventeenth until near the end of the eighteenth century, has also left its impress During this period sporadic attempts were made upon the Low Country Sinhalese.
to suppress Roman Catholicism, but the devotion of the Ceylonese Christians, both
f