( an experience in managing ethnic conflict )
by
Neville Jayaweera
Chapter 8
The twilight of the Vellalas
The reference to two Tamil nationalisms is not intended to deny the overarching consciousness of Tamilness that unites all Tamil speaking people. The Sri Lankan Tamils share a common history, a common language, a common religion, and the occupancy of a common territory for over a thousand years, all of which together constitute the minimum requirements of a claim to nationhood (not to be confused for statehood).
However, within that overarching unity there are also great divergences. Though they all speak the same language, and trace their origins to Tamil Nadu, Jaffna Tamils differ from Eastern Province Tamils and from the Up-Country Tamils, notably in their historical and cultural experiences, and not least in the way they speak Tamil and respond to political challenges.
The Jaffna Tamils community itself is further fragmented. Much to my surprise, one of the discoveries I made during my years in Jaffna was that the seemingly undifferentiated Jaffna Tamil society was cleft right down the middle by an almost impenetrable caste/class barrier, which virtually concretised the Jaffna Tamils into two distinct socio-economic entities, the Vellala and the non-Vellala.
However, before I turn my attention to the issue of what constitutes their separateness, I want to dispel any impression I might have created that the class divide within Jaffna Tamil society was peculiar just to the Tamils.
To the contrary, from as far back as recorded history, the divide between those who owned the means of production and those who worked them has characterised all societies, whether primitive, ancient, medieval or modern, and needless to say, that includes Sri Lanka as well.
What was unique and distinctive about Tamil society was that the rigid caste system set that divide in concrete. Once a person was born a road sweeper he remained a road sweeper throughout his life, with no possibility of escape, even if he had natural endowments that fitted him to be a scientist. The congruence of class with caste made the Tamil system pernicious and vulnerable to revolution as the only possible catalyst for change.
The Radala oppression
The Radala oppression of the Kandyan peasantry was as iniquitous as the Vellala dominance over the non-Vellalas. However, systematic government interventions following Independence helped greatly to mitigate it. In the early 1950s the government appointed a Kandyan Peasantry’s Commission to look into the problems of the Kandyan peasants resulting from the Waste Lands Ordinance of 1840, and on its recommendations successive governments initiated major rehabilitation programmes, under the Land Development Ordinance, for alleviating the plight of the upcountry peasantry.
I recall how when I was working in the Ratnapura and Badulla Districts in the 1950s/60s, we acquired large tracts of land from the surrounding tea and rubber estates and alienated them in small allotments to the landless. Likewise, we cleared whole swathes of forests and launched colonisation projects also for settling the landless and for stepping up rice production. Furthermore, the Paddy Lands Act also helped to release the stranglehold that landowners exercised over the pauperised peasantry.
Kannangara’s free education scheme and a network of Central Schools, proved another great catalyst.
By helping to diminish rural landlessness, and by reducing discontentment amongst the poor, these government initiatives put a brake on social and political instability, until rapid economic growth in the decades that followed, reduced the peoples’ dependence on land and enabled a fairer distribution of the national product.
Marginalising the non-Vellalas
Such initiatives, to mitigate the effects of landlessness among the Tamils of Jaffna, were not launched on a scale in any way comparable to those in the South and discontentment among their landless and the marginalised, i.e. among the non-Vellalas, continued to escalate.
When I took over as GA of Jaffna in 1963 I was appalled to see the paucity of governments’ interventions on their behalf, and they represented 60% of the population of the district. The only fully functioning major irrigation project was Iranamadu, which had been restored by the British, pre-Independence, and most of the lands benefitting from its waters belonged to the Vellalas. The other projects, still incomplete at that time were Akkarayankulam and Tharmapuram, both in the Vanni, but they barely made an impact on the mounting sense of frustration among the non-Vellalas, and they were being driven to despair. All my personal pleas to Colombo, to Minister C.P. de Silva and to the Prime Minister herself, evoked one response - “wait for the Mahaveli diversion” - which at that time did not seem even a distant prospect.
For over a hundred years, lacking land and access to government service, which were avenues monopolised by the Vellalas, many non-Vellalas took to smuggling as a profession. Valvettiturai, the home of Pirabhikaran, was its hub, and the inhabitants of a considerable stretch of the northern coast depended on smuggling for their livelihood, supplemented of course by the fishing industry.
As far as governments in Colombo were aware, the problem of the Tamils was simply the language problem and their demand for regional autonomy. It was only a matter of time before the non-Vellalas would demonstrate that they were driven by more fundamental concerns, such as opportunities to live with dignity as human beings, free from the oppression either of the Vellalas or of the Sinhala state.
A silent conspiracy
There was almost a silent conspiracy, unintended but effective nonetheless, to consign the non-Vellalas to oblivion. The members of the silent conspiracy comprised the British rulers, the Vellalas, the government, the Marxist parties and not least the intellectual class.
The British followed the age old maxim of all imperialisms, which is to co-opt the local ruling class, in this instance the Vellalas, as their comprador agents. The British did exactly the same among the Sinhala.
The Vellalas willingly submitted to co-option by the British who responded by colluding in the Vellala’s domination of the rest of the Tamil society. It is significant that throughout 500 years of colonial domination of Jaffna, after the fall of Sangkili, the last King of Jaffna, in 1581, there were no significant resistance movements against the colonial masters as there were among the Sinhala in the South. The Vellalas never produced a Keppetipola (1818) or a Gongalagoda Banda or a Purang Appu (1848) - even though the latter were both dummy heroes - as symbols of an anti colonial protest.
It was not only the colonial rulers who colluded with the Vellalas in reducing the non-Vellalas to oblivion. So did the entire political establishment in the Sinhala South.
When successive governments in the South thought that they were negotiating with the leaders of the Tamil people, they were in fact talking only to the Vellala class leaders, represented by the FP and the TC, whereas a vast 60% underclass had no status or place in those negotiations. It was as if they did not exist at all. These negotiations focussed mostly on issues like language and standardisation policies, which were important primarily to the Vellalas, but not to the non-Vellalas. The Vellalas campaigned on the language issue primarily because the elevation of Sinhala to the status of the official language deprived them of opportunities to make their way through the public service, and not merely because language was a fundamental right. The public service had been the stamping ground of the Vellalas and the loss of opportunities to access it, because of language, made no difference to the non-Vellalas. Likewise, when the Vellalas launched a sustained campaign to tar the “Sri” symbol on motor vehicles, it had no meaning for the non-Vellalas who not only did not own cars, but did not have even donkeys to ride on!
The Marxist parties must also share some part of the blame for keeping the non-Vellalas voiceless. Given the opportunity to integrate the oppressed castes of Jaffna into the wider class struggle, they clung to their text book doctrine that only an organised urban proletariat was capable of leading the revolution, and relegated the oppressed peasantry to a lumpen status, incapable of mounting any resistance to oppression. Kandiah, MP of Point Pedro ( Moscow Wing) and P. Shanmugatahasan (Peking wing) were the only noteworthy exceptions but they never developed their base in the peninsula. Pirabhikaran filled that vacuum.
The intellectual class
The intellectual class, the academics and the scholars, and the broad NGO community of the South, had neither time nor space for the non-Vellalas. They produced reams of learned papers, wrote scores of books, organised countless seminars the world over and put out impressive bibliographies, with the ethnic conflict as their subject, but how much space did they devote to looking at caste as a powerful motor driving the ethnic conflict? How much empirical research into the caste structure of Jaffna have Sri Lankan academics and scholars carried out? Granted that since 1983 empirical research would have impossible in Jaffna, why is that there have not been serious attempts at even conceptualising the caste issue or at developing even a tentative hypothesis? To my knowledge, and I am open to correction, only two scholarly works have been published on the subject, and both were by foreigners, Bryan Plaffenberg and Peter Robb, and both were concerned more with the caste structure in Tamil Nadu than concretely with the caste system in Jaffna. Furthermore, I have a serious problem with the credibility of the methodologies adopted by both these writers.
Few things illustrate the paucity of the Sri Lankan intellectuals’ agenda, as the fact that when, in 2001, the Marga Institute sponsored what was perhaps the biggest project ever, for looking at the ethnic conflict, and produced 19 monographs on its varied aspects, they forgot to sponsor a single monograph, exclusively for looking at the caste aspect of the conflict. That is the measure of the unreality in which the intellectual class in the South has lived relative to the caste issue in Jaffna.
The twilight of the Vellalas
The Vellalas are a unique Tamil social formation, peculiar only to Sri Lanka. In Tamil Nadu for instance, except for a thin scattering throughout the State there are no indigenous Vellala concentrations of any social or political consequence.
They are also a resourceful people, very intelligent, entrepreneurial, hardworking, disciplined, and resilient, and they have made enormous contributions towards Sri Lanka’s advancement in all spheres of the nation’s life.
They are unique for another reason as well. They consider themselves superior to any other Tamil group anywhere in the world, whether it be in the Eastern Province, or in the Up-Country, or even in Tamil Nadu, and consider their own spoken Tamil to be the Gold Standard, and the Tamil spoken elsewhere as “coolie” Tamil. I can myself bear witness to the distinctiveness of the spoken Vellala Tamil. I learnt Tamil from a Vellala pundit and when I started speaking it to the ordinary people of Jaffna, their eyes boggled in disbelief and incomprehension. It had the same effect as speaking the Queen’s English to the dockyard workers of Tilbury.
The assumed superiority and hubris of the Vellala class ultimately proved their undoing. They isolated themselves from every other centre of Tamil political power, principally Tamil Nadu, and when they had their backs to the wall, there were no allies to bail them out. They had no leverage, in Sri Lanka or abroad, and as the props that supported their power disintegrated, their demise as a political force in Sri Lanka was inevitable.
Three major factors contributed towards this calamitous outcome. Vellala dominance rested on what had seemed an indestructible tripod.
1. One leg of the tripod was the patronage of the British.
2. The second leg of the tripod was access to government service and
3. The third leg was the ownership of land in the peninsula and elsewhere in the North.
Let us look at how that tripod crumbled within just fifty years.
The British gave the initial impetus to the Vellala class in their ascent to power. To gauge the extent of that impetus, one has only to read, as I have done, the daily diaries of Acland Dyke, GA of Jaffna for 38 years and of William Twyneham, GA for 28 years. Their patronage of the Vellalas was fulsome, and it enabled their young men who passed out from mission schools in Jaffna to gain speedy entry into government service. That is not to say that these young men could not have managed on their own, or did not merit their appointments. They were very intelligent, entrepreneurial, hard working, disciplined, loyal, and thrifty, qualities which any ruler would value very highly, and on the strength of which they would have progressed even unaided. They are qualities that economists and historians have identified as the driving motor of capitalism and as the foundation blocks of empire. However when the British relinquished power, the Vellalas lost the umbrella under which they had prospered for over a century, and they had to fend for themselves. Along with the Sinhala leaders of the time, like the Senanayakes, E.W.Perera, et al, Ponnambalam Ramanathan and Ponnambalam Arunachalam positioned themselves in the vanguard of the nationalist struggle but they were from the top drawer of Tamil society, who having already appropriated economic and social power, were now seeking political power to augment their armoury. When the British left, without securing for the Vellala class the political power they craved, the Vellalas had their backs to the wall, but it took them some time to read the writing on it!
It was only after 1956 that the Vellalas began to read the writing on the wall. As the Sinhala Only policy worked its way through the system, the structure and complexion of the public services changed dramatically. In a field where they once reigned, the Vellala class found themselves progressively marginalised and reduced to a rump, and the second leg of the Vellala power tripod began to crumble.
The third leg of the tripod began to crumble not under pressure from without, but under assault from within. Post 1983, when the militant groups, principally the LTTE, began to assert power in the peninsula and started demanding monetary contributions from the only people who had money, mostly in cash and jewellery, i.e. from the Vellalas, and also started demanding from their families support for the “cause” in the form of man power, that is, at least one son from each family, the Vellala families cut and fled, either to Colombo, or abroad, leaving their properties to be expropriated by the rebels.
Let us not forget that the Vellalas are a very bourgeois people. They are unused to living in trenches, to being bitten by fleas and ticks, and to braving the blistering Vanni sun, or of running the risk of violent death, preferring instead to work at desks, or in hospitals or in the law courts and seeking always the comforts of a respectable middle class life.
When the Vellalas abandoned their houses and lands in the peninsula, the non-Vellalas simply walked in and took them over, carrying out thereby a thoroughly radical programme of land expropriation, that had not been attempted anywhere else in Sri Lanka, and comparable to the eviction of Kulaks from their holdings in the early years of the Russian Revolution. It was not merely that the rebels moved in and took over Vellala lands but they obliterated all old boundaries, fences, and surveyors’ bench marks, so that any attempt hereafter by the original owners to reclaim their properties on the basis of their title deeds is a near impossibility.
Furthermore, from the early 1980s, as successive armies trudged backwards and forwards over their lands, and as High Security Zones widened their perimeters and as the familiar land marks and boundaries that defined privately owned plots of land were erased, most of Jaffna’s agricultural plots were reduced to a wasteland and the once green fields are now largely abandoned. The small-holding agricultural economy of the Jaffna peninsula has all but collapsed, and with it the last bastion of Vellala power.
The collapse of the Vellalas as an indigenous political force may delight many of their critics, but it has left a vacuum in the political configuration of the country, which will have far reaching ramifications and consequences, and their critics may have to think again. Let me turn now to that issue.
to be continued
