Introduction
The institution of caste among Sinhala Sri Lankans has posed a scholarly challenge. Is it a watered-down version of Hindu caste? Something else entirely? Should one even talk about it? Louis Dumont famously labeled Sinhala caste “quasi” because it did not subordinate political to religious authority (Reference Dumont and Sainsbury1970: 215–16). Patrick Peebles suggested that without the integrating presence of Brahmins, it is “castes without a caste system” (Reference Peebles1995: 45). It also has been described as “less rigorous,” lacking the “extreme inequalities of untouchability in India” (Kannangara Reference Kannangara1984: 164; Seneviratne Reference Seneviratne2000: 215). Some recent researchers, noting the topic’s sensitivity, have suggested that interviewee discomfort may be reason enough to forego inquiry altogether (e.g., Douglas Reference Douglas2015).
Neither the ambivalence nor the Indian yardstick is new. Reflecting colonial policy, E. B. Denham, Superintendent of Census Operations for Ceylon’s 1911 Census, wrote: “As caste does not play in Ceylon the important part it does in India, … information on this subject … [was] not … obtained.” Yet just a few pages later he lamented, “The effects of tradition remain and whether these are called caste distinctions, racial prejudices, or tribal customs, their influence is … felt in every branch of the life of the country” (Reference Denham1912: 177, 193; Rogers Reference Rogers2004a: 71). Denham’s second assertion now appears closer to the mark than his first. Caste distinctions have not only endured, they have mattered: a perennial topic for gossip (Spencer Reference Spencer1990: 190; Stirrat Reference Stirrat and McGilvray1982: 25–26); a significant consideration in marriage (Abeyasekera Reference Abeyasekera2021); a divisive element in Buddhist monastic organization (Gombrich Reference Gombrich1971b: 294 ff.); an impetus for rivalries and power struggles (Moore Reference Moore and Roberts1998: 68–69); and a continual basis for political organizing and identity formation, recently amplified by social media (Gunasekera Reference Gunasekera1994: 99–114; Obeyesekere Reference Obeyesekere1974: 371–73; Wickramasinghe Reference Wickramasinghe2006: 332). Caste is also the primary reason that every year hundreds of Sinhala people petition to change their names (W.M.A. de Silva Reference de Silva2009).Footnote 1
Sinhala caste and caste-like practices cannot be reduced to a simple puzzle with a simple solution. But because the subject continues to arise during fieldwork, I find I cannot keep sweeping it under the rug while rehearsing allusions to it not quite being India, especially now that the old presumption of a timeless and monolithic Hindu caste system to which Sinhala caste might be compared has been thoroughly discredited (Fuller Reference Fuller and Fuller1996; Rogers Reference Rogers2004a). So, throwing caution to the wind, here I reconnoiter a patch of this much trodden terrain anew. I focus on the territory of the former Kandyan Kingdom (ca. 1591–1815), the last holdout to European colonialism. We now know that this interior kingdom was not an isolated world apart (Obeyesekere Reference Obeyesekere, Biedermann and Strathern2017a; Sivasundaram Reference Sivasundaram2013: 5). Nonetheless, the coasts and the Jaffna Peninsula receive only passing reference here because they had more frequent and more sustained interchanges with the subcontinent (Roberts Reference Roberts1980; Sivasundaram Reference Sivasundaram2010: 431); were longer subject to the direct effects of European rule (Dewasiri Reference Dewasiri2008; Kotelawele Reference Kotelawele1988); and in some of these areas, caste distinctions were reinforced by the Catholic Church (Stirrat Reference Stirrat and McGilvray1982: 23–25; Guha Reference Guha2013: 24).Footnote 2
Another early procedural choice proved unsustainable: to consider Sinhala caste on its own. Because scholars have documented the shapeshifting heterogeneity of caste on the mainland, I presumed that caste in Sri Lanka, too, had been remade primarily within local arenas. I soon realized I could not discount mainland effects. For example, the dualism of early Sri Lankan social organization is redolent of the concurrent dualism found in ancient Tamilakam (Abraham Reference Abraham2003: 207; Stein Reference Stein1980: 173 ff.). And the nineteenth-century colonial idea of a monolithic “Indian caste system” resounded in Sri Lanka despite the fact that it everywhere rode roughshod over the realities of temporal and spatial variability (Fuller Reference Fuller and Fuller1996: 5–7; Rogers Reference Rogers2004b).
Nonetheless, I have come to see Sinhala caste as neither a hodgepodge of introduced elements nor a collateral effect of the subcontinent’s proximity. Its ontogeny has been its own. Here I sketch a possible developmental path. I visit the question of origins, combining evidence from mainland and island archaeology, traditional texts, and recent genetic research. Together, these suggest that Sinhala caste began to develop during the first millennium CE, later than sometimes assumed (e.g., Abeyaratne Reference Abeyaratne, Ucko and Layton1999: 137; Ryan Reference Ryan1993[1953]: 3). I then explore the simple bifurcation of society into “high” and “low” people, as described by fourth century CE authors; this duality’s persistence into the early second millennium; its elaboration in the bureaucratic political economy of the Kandyan Kingdom; and the dissonance between this Sinhala model of collective inequality and the Brahmanical model brought to bear by colonial powers and the Sinhala elite. To better understand how people negotiate living with two conflicting models of caste, I end with a case study of a non-elite community.
From a universalist perspective, caste exemplifies what sociologist Charles Tilly called “social categories that justify and sustain unequal advantage” (Reference Tilly2001: 362). But Tilly cautioned that universalism is always tempered by historicism: “How the [inequality’s] mechanisms concatenate and what large-scale effects they produce both depend on the cultural milieu in which they operate” (Reference Tilly2000: 489). Importantly, he emphasized that in all milieus social categories are not fixed but emerge dynamically from ongoing “transactions across social positions” (Reference Tilly2001: 362). The story of Sinhala caste that my exploration has produced is indeed one of dynamic, adaptive, and relational collective identities.
Origins
Social scientists typically use the word caste to indicate social groupings that are endogamous, associated with distinctive occupations and diets, ascribed relational moral valences, and afforded differential access to resources, power, and status. None of these different strands of identity ascription is unique to South Asia. But there, they are knotted together to produce the understanding that human beings are naturally subdivided into intrinsically distinct varieties (Guha Reference Guha2013: 1–2). It is not known when or where this view first arose. While archaeological, textual, and historical evidence indicates that individual elements go back millennia, their interweaving into a holistic sense of human difference appears to be a more recent phenomenon (Boivin Reference Boivin, Petraglia and Allchin2007: 341; Conningham and Young Reference Coningham and Young2015: 32–33; Sinopoli Reference Sinopoli1991: 184–85). For example, archaeologists excavating the sophisticated cities of the Indus Valley civilization, at its height from 2600–1900 BCE, have uncovered evidence of craft specialists taught their skills by kin. But there are no indications of residential segregation or dietary differentiations and, in contrast to contemporaneous cities in Egypt and Mesopotamia, even the existence of political and religious elites is uncertain (Kenoyer Reference Kenoyer and Kenoyer1989; Green Reference Green2021).
A millennium or so after the decline of the Indus cities, something closer to what we think of as caste appeared in Sanskrit technical treatises (śāstra) written by Brahmins. Beginning about the fourth century BCE, a śāstra “sub-genre” called Dharmaśāstra referred routinely to four hereditary social classes (varṇa): priests, rulers and soldiers, traders, and farmers and craftspeople (Olivelle Reference Olivelle2011b: 155; Reference Olivelle2011a: 218). However, according to Sanskritist Patrick Olivelle, this was not caste: “These texts recognize only the division of society into four varṇas and their social ideology is based on varṇa and not on caste (jāti)” (Reference Olivelle2011a: 218). Olivelle also noted that when Dharmaśāstra authors addressed ritual purity, they portrayed it as a transient individual condition, not a group attribute or basis for social stratification (ibid.: 240–41).Footnote 3 Furthermore, these texts were not disinterested descriptions of what people were doing; they were assertions of Brahmanical authority at a time when it was being challenged by “the ascetic and world-renouncing ideologies … of the religious reformations in northern India” (Olivelle Reference Olivelle, Krech and Steinicke2012: 119, 122). So, did people heed the texts?
The evidence is mixed. On the one hand, while the well-known Mānava Dharmaśāstra (Law Code of Manu, ca. 200 CE) prescribed class (varṇa) endogamy, it also laid out non-punitive procedures for dealing with the offspring of “mixed classes,” implying that the prescription was contravened too often for deviations to be ignored (Olivelle Reference Olivelle2004: 184 ff.). On the other hand, biological evidence suggests that localized endogamy was indeed on the rise around the time that Manu was written. Geneticists who unpack population histories by analyzing DNA from present-day people have found that around 200 CE the subcontinent “…experienced a demographic transformation … from a region in which major population mixture was common to one in which mixture even between closely related groups became rare because of a shift to endogamy” (Moorjani et al. Reference Moorjani2013: 430).Footnote 4
Archaeologists, too, have looked for evidence that śāstra precepts affected popular practice. Robin Coningham and Ruth Young reviewed site reports for ancient South Asian cities and compared them to town planning directives found in the Arthaśāstra (ca. 300 BCE–300 CE). They found that while the quadrangular layouts and other architectural details of some South Asian cities, including the ancient Sinhala capital at Anuradhapura, appeared to heed the text, many did not (2015: 417–19). Furthermore, in Sri Lanka there was no evidence of the text’s recommended segregation of people by varṇa. Coningham and Young’s analyses of the particularly well-preserved materials from Anuradhapura Period I (ca. 350–275 BCE) and Period G/H (275 BCE–200 CE) revealed “…no distinct areas associated with specific castes.” They also found that “…[remains of food] species forbidden and permitted by the laws of Manu were found together throughout the city” (Coningham et al. Reference Coningham, Biedermann and Strathern2017: 39). We note, however, that the end date for Coningham and Young’s sample was 200 CE, the approximate date for both Manu’s composition and the beginnings of highly localized endogamy on the mainland. Perhaps if the archaeologists had included a later period in their analysis, they would not have come up empty-handed.
In sum, we do not really know when caste began. Individual elements waxed and waned over the centuries and evidence for their interweaving is uncertain. Furthermore, as Nicole Boivin has warned, attempts to extrapolate from thin information about the past to the presence of anything like a caste system inevitably “suffer from a tendency to infer caste from otherwise ambiguous data strictly on the basis of a South Asian context” (Reference Boivin, Petraglia and Allchin2007: 349). But Boivin also urged us to persevere, to avoid “shying away” from trying to map caste’s development (ibid.: 357). For that, one needs a starting point. My reading of the evidence discussed here is that on the mainland but not the island there was a significant social shift affecting local group intermarriage around 200 CE. Therefore, it is likely that the starting point for pursuing the story of Sinhala caste should be after that point, that is, around the middle of the first millennium CE.
Early History
Scholars often look first to the South Asian subcontinent as a source of Sinhala culture. Caste is no exception. But although we find similar artifacts and practices on the mainland and the island, local customization rather than wholesale adoption was the norm.Footnote 5 Furthermore, Sri Lanka has long been engaged with a wider geography. By the fifth.century CE, the island was the center of the Indian Ocean trade connecting South Asia with the Mediterranean world, North Africa, Arabia, Southeast Asia, and China (Bandaranayake Reference Bandaranayake2012; Bopearachchi, Senarath, and Perera Reference Bopearachchi, Disanayaka, Perera, Boussac, Salles and Yon2016: 415; Schenk Reference Schenk2006: 123; Weisshaar Reference Weisshaar and Tripati2015: 219). Archaeologists in Sri Lanka have unearthed late Roman coins, amphorae made in Egypt and Mesopotamia, Southeast Asian-style sprinkler jars, and Chinese ceramics (Coningham et al. Reference Coningham, Biedermann and Strathern2017: 26–27; Kessler Reference Kessler, Boussac, Salles and Yon2016: 445; Schenk Reference Schenk and Tripati2015: 162–67; Schenk and Weisshaar Reference Schenk, Weisshaar, Boussac, Salles and Yon2016: 465–72; Strathern Reference Strathern2009: 827). In a time when “the seas were often less a barrier to travel and communication than a vehicle for it,” the island’s location and harbors underwrote far-reaching networks of commerce and religion (Strathern and Biedermann Reference Strathern, Biedermann, Biedermann and Strathern2017: 2; also Bopearachchi Reference Bopearachchi2008: 2). These external linkages contributed to the making of distinct milieus for the development of Sinhala caste.
For example, first millennium CE Sinhala religion had at least three different ingredients. Foremost was Buddhism, introduced from the northern subcontinent during the third.century BCE. It subsequently evolved in exchanges with Southeast Asia to become part of a regional Buddhist tradition grounded in shared Pāli (rather than Sanskrit or Gāndhārī) texts and an important facilitator of interregional trade networks (Ray Reference Ray1994: 189–91; Salomon Reference Salomon1999: 3–8; Stargardt Reference Stargardt and Pearsall2008: 675; Weisshaar Reference Weisshaar and Tripati2015: 221–22). Second was probably the still mysterious “Tabbova-Maradanmaduva culture,” evidence for which consists of hundreds of deliberately damaged (“sacrificed”) terracotta figures excavated at twenty northern and mid-island sites (Coningham et al. Reference Coningham2012). This culture may represent the persistence of pre-Buddhist traditions, traces of which linger in Sinhala Buddhist village rituals today (Gombrich Reference Gombrich1971a; Paranavitana Reference Paranavitana1929). And finally, there was Brāhmaṇism, its persistence testified to by the remains of Hindu shrines and rock inscriptions found alongside Buddhist ones; the propitiation of deities of Hindu origin in Buddhist rituals; and artifacts, such as the little “Lakshmi plaques” excavated widely and variously interpreted as coins or amulets (Coningham et al. Reference Coningham, Biedermann and Strathern2017: 35, 37–38; Wallburg Reference Wallburg, Weisshaar, Dissanayake and Wijeyapala2008: 85–108). Together, these three made up a uniquely Sinhala religious amalgam.
Sinhala social ranking also took a distinctive turn. First millennium CE Sinhala society lacked the depth of hierarchical differentiations that developed during the post-Buddhism resurgence of Brāhmaṇism on the northern subcontinent (Stein Reference Stein and Arnold2010: 87). The Mahāvaṃsa, a key forth century CE chronicle, described society in Sri Lanka’s north as having two levels: “people of good family” (kulīnā), who own land and work for themselves, and “people of lower classes” (hīnā), “artisans and craftsmen [who] … work for other people…” (Geiger Reference Geiger and Bechert1960: 30–31). Pāli scholar Wilhelm Geiger stressed that the Mahāvaṃsa used the word pessā for craftsmen categories, not jāti or vaṇṇa (varṇa), adding: “In the chapters of the Mahāvaṃsa where medieval times are described, the institution of castes is seldom mentioned…” (p. 25). On the island’s southern coast, archaeologists excavating the Tissamaharama Citadel (450 BCE–500 CE) also observed a two-level hierarchy: “…[a] sharp difference between the Workmen’s Quarter … and the living quarters with large mansions…” (Weisshaar Reference Weisshaar and Tripati2015: 220).
Interestingly, while Sinhala social structure contrasted with the mainland north, it was similar to the mainland south, at least for a while. Early first millennium CE Tamilakam—“roughly the present-day states of Kerala and Tamil Nadu” (Abraham Reference Abraham2003: 207)—also was two-tiered. The higher tier was composed of Brahmins, then expanding from north to south. The larger, lower tier comprised the ilipirappalar (low-born) or śūdras, a broad, flexible, and generally undifferentiated class that included farmers, craftsmen, and service groups (Avari Reference Avari2007: 241; Gurukkal Reference Gurukkal1998: 42). However, within a few centuries, Tamilakam’s lower tier had become internally divided into Right Hand and Left Hand castes (jāti), a different bifurcation that persisted into the twentieth century (Appadurai Reference Appadurai1974: 216; Beck Reference Beck1970; Stein Reference Stein1980: 173–215). On the right were agriculturalists and subordinate service castes; on the left, more autonomous and mobile artisan and merchant castes. Brahmins, now more numerous and influential in the south, were placed either at the head of the Right Hand division or atop the system altogether (Appadurai Reference Appadurai1974: 218). A similar dual organization has been reported for twentieth-century Tamils on Sri Lanka’s Jaffna Peninsula but not for Sinhala people (David Reference David1972: 204–49; Pfaffenberger Reference Pfaffenberger1982: 82–91; cf. Banks Reference Banks and Leach1960: 74).Footnote 6 Some scholars have suggested that the Right/Left system functioned to absorb immigrant craft and trading groups into local agricultural social formations, which, as we will see, has parallels with later developments in Sinhala Sri Lanka (Appadurai Reference Appadurai1974: 226; Obeyesekere Reference Obeyesekere1975: 46).
The northern Sinhala kingdom described by the Mahāvaṃsa did not survive the first millennium CE. By the eleventh century, it had been weakened by climate change, malaria, and invasions from the mainland (K. M. de Silva Reference de Silva and de Silva1977: 44–46; Lucero, Fletcher, and Coningham Reference Lucero, Fletcher and Coningham2015). Subsequently, political centers and much of the population shifted southwards. Some settled near the coast, attracted by well-watered farmlands and dynamic coastal entrepôts; others chose the relative safety of interior highlands. Transient capitals were established along the way in protected rock fortresses (Dam̆badeniya, Yāpahuwa, Dädigama, and Kurunägala) and upland Gampoḷa, before consolidating in the fifteenth century at Kōttē near the coast, where the Portuguese would find them in 1505; and during the sixteenth century, at Senkaḍagala Nuvara (Kandy) in the highland interior. Historians describe those centuries as unsettled and unstable: political power and administration were fragmented (C. R. de Silva Reference de Silva and de Silva1995a; K. M. de Silva Reference de Silva2016[2005]: 113–14), local rulers (“petty chiefs”) gained autonomy (Kulasuriya Reference Kulasuriya1976), and immigration from the mainland increased (Roberts Reference Roberts1980: 37).
It was during this transitional time that increased interest in inherited collective identities seems to have emerged.Footnote 7 In 1266, at Dam̆badeniya, one of the short-lived capitals, new Buddhist monastic rules called the Dam̆badeniya Katikāvata initiated the requirement that monks be asked their jāti-gōtra (caste/clan) during higher ordination (Gombrich Reference Gombrich1971b: 307; Malalgoda Reference Malalgoda1976: 90). A century later, in the Sinhala capital in highland Gampoḷa (ca. 1341–1415), royal scribes compiled administrative boundary books (kaḍaim pot) that sometimes mentioned caste-like groups in passing. For example, the Srī Laṃkādvīpayē Kaḍaim listed service groups (duravala), low groups (jāti-pajāti, aḍukulayan), Brahmins (bamunu), and people of the “four varṇa” (cāturavarṇaayo) (Abeyawardana Reference Abeyawardana1999: 157/192, 160/196, 165/201).
That varṇa reference might lead us to think that Brahmanical influence was gaining a foothold in Sri Lanka. However, we should be cautious. The kaḍaim described an altered varṇa order: rāja (king), bamunu (Brahmins), velanda (merchants), goi (farmers), and “other jāti-pajāti” (Abeyawardana Reference Abeyawardana1999: 138–40). Elevating rulers above priests befitted Sinhala polities where Brahmins served kings primarily as secular advisors and royal tutors (Obeyesekere Reference Obeyesekere, Biedermann and Strathern2017a: 166; Reference Obeyesekere2017b: 374).Footnote 8 And while boundary books distinguished the different occupations of the non-varṇa population and sometimes grouped them in blocks (e.g., Abeyawardana Reference Abeyawardana1999: 138–39), they did not rank them. Overall, the boundary books recall the Mahāvaṃsa’s ancient social bifurcation: now, varṇa and non-varṇa people, with a focus on services and products forthcoming from each, appropriate for field inventories of kingdom properties and peoples (ibid.: 136, 208–9).
Interestingly, this growing interest in caste-like identities was accompanied by controversy. Even in the elite worlds of monasteries and royal scribes, Sinhala caste apparently was not an accepted social fact. The fourteenth-century Kulavistara (Treatise on Castes) went so far as to caution that because all Sinhala people are mixed descendants of immigrants from the subcontinent, “…Siṃhala residents should not refer to … caste membership” (ibid.: 17). The Janavaṃsaya (ca. 1420),Footnote 9 a much-cited Sinhala compilation of imaginative origin stories for dozens of occupational groups, credited almost every group with Brahmin roots. As if to underline an anti-caste stance, the Janavaṃsaya’s author interpolated the text with lines from the Vasala Sutta, Buddha’s well-known anti-caste teaching: “Not by birth is one an outcast; not by birth is one a brahman. By deed one becomes an outcast, by deed one becomes a brahman” (Ariyapala Reference Ariyapala1956: 290–91; Janavaṃsaya 1887[ca. 1420]; Piyadassi Reference Piyadassi1999; Wickremasinghe Reference Wickremasinghe1900: 86).
The Kandyan Kingdom
Thus, during the centuries leading up to the Kandyan Kingdom (ca. 1591–1815), Sinhala society was increasingly focused on lineage and inherited occupation as important group identifiers. Some sources referred to these groups as jāti, others used the word kula, Sanskrit for family or lineage (Olivelle Reference Olivelle2011a: 158). These groups were not understood to have a linear hierarchical relation to each other. Historian Nirmal Dewasiri wrote, “A community becomes a caste only by being integrated into a caste hierarchy” (Reference Dewasiri2008: 187). But the hierarchy that emerged in the Kandyan Kingdom was neither the ladder-like ordering of the mainland’s North nor the South’s twin hierarchies. Instead, the Kingdom retained the ancient dualism. Returning to Geiger: “The division of the whole society into two which had begun in the medieval period with the distinction between kulīnā and hīnā is now [by the Kandyan period] definitely completed” (Geiger Reference Geiger and Bechert1960: 32; also Dewaraja Reference Dewaraja and de Silva1995: 375; Gunasinghe Reference Gunasinghe1990[1980]: 105). Agriculturalists (farmer, goi-vaṃsa, Goigama) composed the upper half of the population, with an internal elite group called Radala (Obeyesekere Reference Obeyesekere2017b: 374). A dozen or so service and craft specialist groups made up the non-Goigama half of the population without a “fixed order of precedence” (Dewaraja Reference Dewaraja and de Silva1995: 379; also Dewasiri Reference Dewasiri2008: 186–88; Pieris Reference Pieris1956: 176).Footnote 10
But Geiger’s “division of the whole society into two” does scant justice to the Kandyan Kingdom’s evolving complexities. The underlying principle was simple enough. The king was the lord and protector of the kingdom’s land; therefore, almost all land users owed taxes, rājakāriya (king’s work).Footnote 11 Rājakāriya was a perennial obligation. It defined citizenship, ran with the land, and mobilized labor at local, regional, and kingdom levels. After the Dutch “ousted the Portuguese” and gained control of the kingdom’s formerly lucrative external trade in the mid-seventeenth century, the king’s dependence on rājakāriya increased (Dewaraja Reference Dewaraja and de Silva1995: 391–92). Accordingly, the organizational apparatus for extracting labor and products through obligations attached to inherited and monopolistic trades became more centralized and earlier “flexibility in caste matters” gave way to greater social rigidity (ibid.: 380).
By the early eighteenth century, elite Goigama administrators were overseeing a service bureaucracy made up of occupation-specific departments (badda), each with its own head, obligations, and entitlements (Dewaraja, Arasaratnam, and Kotelawele Reference Dewaraja, Arasaratnam, Kotelawele and de Silva1995: 335–36). For example, the Potter’s Department (baḍahāla-badda) saw to it that “Each provincial chief … sent his quota of men to the capital for three months of the year to perform whatever service required of them…” (Pieris Reference Pieris1956: 99; also, Dewaraja, Arasaratnam, and Kotelawele Reference Dewaraja, Arasaratnam, Kotelawele and de Silva1995: 335). This duty was rotated among the kingdom’s four central provinces so that “the king always had potters at his service” (Pieris Reference Pieris1956: 99). While serving, the potters were fed and housed but not paid. Once their service period ended, they returned to their villages to farm, make pottery in their workshops, and live with their families on kingdom land. Not all specialists were called to Kandy for rājakāriya. Some served a regional landholding governor, chief, or temple, and others had no service obligations but sold their products or traded with other specialists (Kulasekera Reference Kulasekera1985: 207). The Kandyan bureaucracy was most effective in the central provinces; at the kingdom’s distant edges, “the overlordship of the monarch and his state officials was scarcely noticed…” (Pieris Reference Pieris1956: 44; also, Dewaraja, Arasaratnam, and Kotelawele Reference Dewaraja, Arasaratnam, Kotelawele and de Silva1995: 337–38).
Some lands and even whole villages were held outright by Buddhist temples and deity shrines, which were able to claim the owed goods and services for themselves (Pieris Reference Pieris1956: 22–24, 180–87).Footnote 12 An excerpt from the land register of the Wilbawa Pattinī Dēvālē gives the flavor of these arrangements. Again using Potters as an example, here are the obligations specified for those who use the nineteenth share or “Potters’ portion” of the dēvālē (deity shrine) land: “During the four festivals to give one hundred clay pots to the dēvālē; to tile the roof of the Pattinī dēvālē; and during the Yala season festival, to provide fifty oil lamps; and once a month to keep watch over the dēvālē; and once a year to give a pingo [shoulder-pole] load of pots to the Basnāyake Nilame [lay shrine chief] and a pot for the Bo tree almsgiving. [These] are the duties of the nineteenth share holder.”Footnote 13
The Kandyan Kingdom’s economic administration was a clever system that addressed the reality that because population density was low,Footnote 14 labor was harder to come by than land (Bandarage Reference Bandarage1983: 196). This mode of labor extraction did not depend upon a comprehensive ranking of occupational specialists in relation to each other or upon the debasement of non-elite groups by the elite. It depended, rather, on system-wide participation and interdependence (Obeyesekere Reference Obeyesekere2017b: 374–75).
So, is caste the best way to understand the high/low structural dualism that ordered endogamous occupational groups on much of the island for almost two millennia? Only if we avoid conjuring a stereotypical vision of the subcontinent’s religion-justified hierarchies. As Obeyesekere has observed, there is no Sinhala word for “caste” that does not also have other meanings, and while the Brahmanical varṇa categories were known in Kandyan times, they were cited only on “… formal occasions, such as during a ritual for gods or as a reference term in written texts” (Reference Obeyesekere2017b: 374; also Rogers Reference Rogers2004b: 627). If even the simple four-level varṇa scheme did not provide the working model for how all these occupation-associated groups understood their relationship to each other, then what did?
Models of Caste
When we think about social strata, we imagine layers, such as the horizontal sediment stripes revealed by a road cut or a wedding cake’s frosted tiers. The four ranked classes (varṇa) of the śāstra literature and the myriad local caste (jāti) hierarchies that appeared and disappeared over the centuries on the subcontinent may fit this image.
But the social structure of the Kandyan Kingdom seems to call for a different visualization, one that includes not only high and low, but also center and periphery, more cartwheel than ladder. We can picture the king and his elite administrators occupying the cartwheel’s raised hub; specialist providers arrayed in villages around the rim; and goods and services flowing along the spokes into the center with rights to land and other recognitions returned. The cartwheel was adaptable. It could incorporate new spokes—Muslims, Christians, Indian migrants who settled on kingdom land, refugees from colonial rule on the coast—without losing its integrity or forcing people into arbitrary categorical boxes. It was a suitable system for a dynamic, cosmopolitan polity faced with the task of absorbing new peoples (Strathern and Biedermann Reference Strathern, Biedermann, Biedermann and Strathern2017; Sivasundaram Reference Sivasundaram2013: 41–43).
But while the superiority of the Goigama hub in relation to the service provider spokes was clear, how the spokes stood in relation to each other was not. Most villages were small, single-specialist communities. Few occasions brought different specialists together so that a hierarchy might be negotiated. Even weekly markets where producers congregated to buy, sell, or barter goods and services did not exist until the mid-nineteenth century, introduced by the British to provision the needs of expanding cities and estates (Winslow Jackson Reference Winslow Jackson and de A. Samarasinghe1977: 76–84).
The Äsaḷa perahära, a Buddhist parade festival held annually in the kingdom’s capital, Kandy, has been described as a “pre-eminent representation of the [Sinhala] caste system” (Seneviratne Reference Seneviratne1978: 112). But the participating specialists—shrine chiefs, whip crackers, drummers, dancers, elephant handlers, and so on—did so as members of individual parade sections, not in a single hierarchical order. The arrangement of the sections laid out the kingdom’s core values and cartwheel political structure: Buddha, represented by the Tooth Relic; contingents from each of the four central deity shrines; representatives of the central administrative departments; and representatives of the twelve ranked territorial divisions (Seneviratne Reference Seneviratne1978: 108–10; Winslow Reference Winslow1984).
Outside the Kandyan Kingdom, pre-colonial society is less well-documented because almost all indigenous archives were destroyed in warfare (K. M. de Silva Reference de Silva and de Silva1995: 3). But after first the Portuguese (1505–1658) and then the Dutch (1658–1796) gained control of the coasts, they quickly created new records to identify group-based service obligations they could enforce for their own support and profit (Dewasiri Reference Dewasiri2008: 5, 32–33, 86; Rogers Reference Rogers2004a: 54–57; Strathern Reference Strathern2008: 101–4). The Europeans referred to the service groups as casta, using a word from Portuguese, the colonial lingua franca in South Asia, denoting human and animal groups distinguishable by bloodline (Guha Reference Guha2013: 19–25). For the Portuguese and the Dutch, it was enough to simply distinguish one casta from another; for their purposes, a more detailed sociology was not needed.
The British expelled the Dutch from the coasts in 1796 and gained the interior Kandyan Kingdom in 1815, becoming the first colonial power to rule the whole island. They, too, undertook an accounting of services owed. In the coastal areas, they began by distributing a circular seeking relevant information from local revenue collectors.Footnote 15 Responses received ranged from brief assertions of universal liability for coolie and military duty to detailed “caste” lists, which included not only the usual specialists—fishers, potters, and so on—but also Europeans, Chinese, Dutch, Moors, Parsis, and slaves. For the interior areas formerly held by the Kandyan king, early British observers reported simply “high” and “low” castes. British surgeon John Davy did attempt a more detailed breakdown of interior castes but confessed that it was “not perhaps … thoroughly accurate,” because “…the relative rank of the lower castes is of little consequence … and differently adjusted in different provinces” (Davy Reference Davy and Gooneratne1969[1821]: 84–85). He added that while “pure Singalese” are “completely Indians,” caste “prevails … to a less extent, and with less effect on the minds of the people” (ibid.: 82, 84).
At first, the British, like their predecessors, applied the word caste to “almost any social group…” (Rogers Reference Rogers2004b: 634; Wickramasinghe Reference Wickramasinghe2006: 47). Then in 1833, the Colonial Office in London sent a deputation, the Colebrooke-Cameron Commission, to investigate the colony’s deficit finances. The commissioners declared that policies distinguishing people by caste were unprogressive and should be discontinued. But erasing caste from official lists, speeches, and policy documents did not so much eliminate it as move it to the shadows where its influence persisted (Rogers Reference Rogers2004b: 639–40, 645). So, while the government followed the Commission’s recommendation to open up the civil service to Ceylonese, in practice this meant giving opportunities to “local elite” (Samaraweera Reference Samaraweera and De Silva1973: 84; also Peebles Reference Peebles1995: 45). When the British sought information about traditional laws and customs, they often turned to this same elite.
The elite had their own concerns. They faced competition from non-elite groups who wanted to translate success in colonial schools and the increasingly mercantilist economy into social status (Jayawardena Reference Jayawardena2000; Kannangara Reference Kannangara2011: xix–xxiv). To maintain their position, the elite were inclined to reinforce the idea, also held by the British, that hereditary groupings were naturally distinctive and that some were entitled to preferment (Kulasekera Reference Kulasekera1985: 217–22; Rogers Reference Rogers2004a: 58–59; Reference Rogers2004b: 640; Wickramasinghe Reference Wickramasinghe2006: 140–42, 171–73). At the same time, the earlier view that Sinhala caste was different from Indian caste was being eroded by the diffusion from the subcontinent of increasingly textualized interpretations of caste (Dirks Reference Dirks2015: 90–99). The influential Níti-Nighaṇḍuva, a late nineteenth-century account of Kandyan law compiled from interviews with Kandyan elites and translated by a succession of British officials, even opens with an alleged migration of “four great castes” from India to Sri Lanka, an assertion of priority by those who also were claiming varṇa heritage in public debates (LeMesurier and Panabokke Reference LeMesurier and Panabokke1880: 5–6; Kannangara Reference Kannangara and Robb1995: 118). English anthropologist A. M. Hocart went so far as to base his account of Indian caste on his experiences as Archaeological Commissioner in Ceylon (Hocart Reference Hocart1950: 3).
Frederic Austin Hayley, an English lawyer who represented clients before the Ceylon Supreme Court in the early twentieth century, witnessed these contradictions first-hand. In his own compilation of Kandyan law he wrote: “The caste system in Ceylon, like many of the social institutions of the Island, while exhibiting in certain features similarities to its Indian counterpart, has developed upon lines of its own, which distinguish it as a separate local phenomenon…. Native [colonial and Sri Lankan] historians, on the other hand, have always been at pains to bring the divisions of caste into line with the Indian distinctions as described by Manu” (Hayley Reference Hayley1994[1923]: 146, 147). Thus, Sinhala people entered the twentieth century with two starkly different conceptual models available to them for thinking about themselves and others as members of caste-like social groups: the two-level multi-spoked cartwheel and the multiple-level ladder. The two are so different that we might wonder how they have been brought together in contemporary social life. Have they merged? Has one taken over, the other faded away? Can they coexist?
Living with Multiple Models of Caste
The depth of the contrast between these two models was brought home to me when a Potter friendFootnote 16 told me his version of the Mahāsammata story. The usual starting point for this tale is that long ago, after eons of living as gods in “anarchic bliss,” people grew selfish and thereby lost their immortality while society descended into chaos. Realizing they needed someone to restore order, the people chose Mahāsammata, “one selected by … all,” as their ruler (Pieris Reference Pieris1956: 169–70). This story is told widely in Sri Lanka (Stirrat Reference Stirrat and McGilvray1982: 18). But the Vidānē Mahattea’sFootnote 17 version stands out for its brevity. Here, in its entirety, is what he said:
“Mahāsammata Rājarua was a king soon after Vijaya came to the island and destroyed the Yaksha (demons) who were living here.Footnote 18 He gave to different families all the work for the palace and he made the divisions last through the generations.”
I asked,
“Where did the levels come from, the differences between high and low?”
The Vidānē Mahattea replied,
“Mahāsammata Rājarua did not make the levels, only the divisions. Higher and lower came later, as those who had more difficult lives were thought lower than those who had easier lives, like someone who has a government job and someone who is poor and has to struggle.”
He hesitated, then added:
“But the king might have had it [the levels] in his mind when he gave out the jobs” (fieldnotes, 25 Nov. 1975).
The Vidānē Mahattea’s Mahāsammata story encompasses royalty, occupational differentiation, and economic inequality. The image of the king in his palace amidst specialists providing him with goods and services suggests the Kandyan cartwheel. We also notice that people existed before they were divided, a contrast to the Vedic origin story. That hymn describes how, by dividing up the primordial man, Puruṣa, the gods created people and varṇa together: Brahmins from Puruṣa’s head, warriors (Kshatriyas) from his arms, ordinary people (Vaishyas) from his trunk, and servants (Shudras) from his feet (Fuller Reference Fuller2004: 12). While the Mahāsammata story presumes a common humankind, the Puruṣa story implies more fundamental differentiations.
So, how is this discordance encountered and negotiated in people’s lives? The answer to this question is best sought where people live, such as the Vidānē Mahattea’s own village, Walangama.
Kulaya: The Cartwheel at Home
Walangama (my pseudonym) is a Potter caste village located in the Kurunegala District, formerly the Seven Korales, an outlying province (disāvanē) of the Kandyan Kingdom.Footnote 19 Walangama people prefer to discuss caste in the privacy of their homes and workshops. For specific instances of caste identity, they employ the Sanskrit-derived term jātiya (kind or class, applicable to any noun) or combine a caste name with minissu (people), as in “Goigama minissu.” In the abstract, however, they talk about kula bhēdaya, distributed by kulaya. Footnote 20 Carter’s Sinhalese-English dictionary translates kulaya as “caste, rank, or tribe” (Reference Carter1965[1924]: 179). But when Walangama people talk about kulaya, the word conjures more than division. It also invokes the causative agent because of which those divisions exist. One is a Potter (or other inherited caste-like identity) because of one’s kulaya.
In Walangama social theory, kulaya is transmitted unilineally from fathers to children, carried by blood and patrilineal vāsagama names. People told me consistently, “Kulaya always goes with vāsagama.” Interestingly, the Sanskrit root, kula, similarly references bloodline (Olivelle Reference Olivelle, Krech and Steinicke2011b[2006]: 158). Most Walangama marriages are contracted within Potter marriage circles that connect about two dozen villages (Winslow Reference Winslow and Ensminger2002: 165 ff.). But cross-caste marriages do occur, perhaps facilitated by the belief that kulaya carries no implication of pollution (killa)Footnote 21 (Gombrich Reference Gombrich1971b: 181; Silva, Sivapragasam, and Thanges Reference Silva, Sivapragasam and Thanges2009: 2–3; Stirrat Reference Stirrat and McGilvray1982: 13). If a Walangama Potter man brings in a non-Potter bride, their children receive his vāsagama names and his kulaya; they are Potter kulaya. Similarly, when a Walangama Potter woman marries a non-Potter man, the children receive his vāsagama name and kulaya, not hers.
However, kulaya as fixed patrilineal inheritance is not the whole picture. There exists another dimension, a more mutable bilateral sociality, which gives the mother a small role in determining her children’s kulaya. Yes, everyone agreed, children get their blood from the father. But because of her love, some of a mother’s blood passes into her milk and on to her children, transmitting a bit of her kulaya as it does. This is consistent with Stirrat’s account of caste on Sri Lanka’s west coast. There, too, where caste is unequivocally said to be a matter of patrifiliation, when the parents are of different castes, the mother’s caste may affect a child’s status (Stirrat Reference Stirrat and McGilvray1982: 26–30).
An additional factor is residence. It is mentioned mostly with inter-kulaya marriages, still rare in Walangama but increasing (Table 1). For example, three Walangama women have married high-caste Goigama men employed in the military police. The husbands’ work entails long absences from home. So, after virilocal (dīga) marriage ceremonies and brief stays in the husband’s community, each of these couples settled in Walangama while retaining the right to later return to their husbands’ villages should they wish. In Walangama, such ambilocality is neither unusual nor confined to mixed-caste marriages. Walangama is relatively uncrowded, with space for newlyweds to build houses. The increasingly mechanized pottery industry provides good money-making work for women and men, even those without traditional skills (Winslow Reference Winslow2016). It is not uncommon for women who have married away to return, husbands and children in tow. In the case of these three marriages, the wives were able to earn money making pottery while enjoying the support of kin as they raised their children without their husbands’ day-to-day involvement. When asked about the children’s caste, however, that mutable, bilateral sociality again came into play. Yes, because their fathers are Goigama, the children are Goigama. But, as one mother explained to me, they are also a little bit Potter caste (apee, “ours”), more than there would be if they lived in her husband’s village. “This is because of where they live,” she said.
Table 1. Percentage of mixed-caste marriages in Walangama over time.
Although Walangama fields and gardens were never held on service tenure, residents link kulaya and place. Echoing the Kandyan cartwheel model of caste, they emphasized differentiation, location, and traditional occupation. They easily recited the names of different castes in nearby villages but were uninterested in relative ranks.Footnote 22 If pushed, they grouped castes dualistically, using categories remarkably like those Geiger found in the fourth century CE Mahāvaṃsa: good people (hoñda minissu), who included, in their view, not only Goigama (the highest caste) but also the Potters themselves; and lower people (aḍuy or bālay minissu), service and artisan castes (also, Gunasinghe Reference Gunasinghe1990[1980]: 109). Both old and young Potters expressed no doubt that their own place is among the good people. They reminded me that the sixth through the tenth nights of the Kandy Äsala Perahära make up the Kumbal (“Potter”) Perahära. They cited a Jātaka (a story of Buddha’s former births) in which Buddha was born to Potter parents and grew up to make pottery to support his own family.Footnote 23 The Potter caste people I know are secure in claiming hoñda minissu status but also are aware that others might not agree.
The village has thrived from pottery making. Comparatively few residents have chosen to leave for agricultural colonization schemes or to work abroad. When I walk in village lanes, I pass busy workshops, neat roadside stacks of pots, and lorries loading pottery to sell. This prosperity enables Walangama residents to entertain Goigama politicians and other notables at funeral and wedding feasts. During the spring pilgrimage season, dozens of pilgrims of all castes walk through the village to a dānsala Footnote 24 in the village temple complex where they consume refreshments prepared by Walangama men and women. Recently, Walangama added to their temple complex an imposing stupa (chaitya), much enlarged from the original plans. When I asked, “Why did you make it so big?,” the temple committee president responded simply, “So that people will come and see.” They are confident in their worth and take pride in their accomplishments. At home, they welcome everyone and do not hide their identity.
But outside Walangama, they have learned to be more cautious. As one Potter man explained to me in 2013, “There are those who might think less of us because of the work we do.”
“In that time…”
In 1975, I had a conversation about caste with a Walangama upāsaka, someone known for piety and religious knowledge. “Is it correct,” I asked the upāsaka, “what some people have told me, that caste no longer exists in Sri Lanka?” “No,” he responded, “that is not right. But it is not like it was in that time (e kālē).” When Sinhala people talk about caste, they usually begin by saying that it is a feature of the past, not the present (Spencer Reference Spencer1990: 189; Stirrat Reference Stirrat and McGilvray1982: 20). They then go on to describe former behavioral constraints for non-elite castes. The upāsaka’s list included:
-
• Potters could not wear tailored shirts or blouses; men had to go bare-chested, and women could only use the end of their sarong or sari to cover their breasts.
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• Deferential forms of address were required when speaking to higher-caste people.
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• When higher castes served food or drink to Potters, it was on disposable leaves and in throwaway coconut shells.
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• In school, Potter children were made to sit apart from higher-caste children.
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• At the Buddhist temple (vihāra) down the road, the Potters listened to the monk’s sermons from outside the door while higher-caste people sat inside.
In contrast to the Mahāsammata story of a simple division of labor, the upāsaka’s list differentiates the Potters in multiple contexts and implies that they once were relegated to a lower status than they now claim. The list has had an impressive longevity. Versions from 1975 and 2013 varied little, and its power to haunt has endured even though contexts for segregation have been transformed. Walangama got its own school in 1959 with a Walangama Potter principal, ending segregation of Potter children (Winslow Reference Winslow and Ullrich2019: 276–82). In the 1990s, Walangama residents built their own temple presided over by monks who do not condone caste discrimination. In 2013, I observed people of castes high and low arriving each morning to work in Walangama’s flourishing pottery workshops, where they consumed the tea, betel leaf, and snacks provided by their Potter employers. Yet that canonical list remained, background music that never quite fades away, a persistent cautionary tale.
However, inter-caste encounters at home have always been few. Like most Sinhala villages, Walangama is composed almost entirely of people of a single kulaya. In the late nineteenth century, R. W. Ievers, Government Agent of the North-Central Province (1886–1893), compiled a list of caste membership for each of the 1,070 villages in his province. All but nine were single-caste. Ievers concluded: “Persons of different caste did not live together in any village” (Reference Ievers1899: 89–90).Footnote 25 More recent reports concur. Marguerite Robinson wrote of a high-caste Goigama village in the central Kandyan highlands, “Morapitiya is a single-caste and rather isolated village; the people, therefore, have relatively little contact with persons of low-caste status” (Reference Robinson1975 :31). Paul Alexander found that in a fisher village on the south coast, “…most meetings between the Karāva fishermen and other castes take place in … small towns” (Reference Alexander1995: 25). And in the northern Vanni, James Brow observed that “…those who lived in the same village were normally all members of the same caste…” (Reference Brow1996: 50).
So, it is primarily when the Potters leave Walangama that they must deal with a multi-caste world. When they work at home in their own workshops, marry within their own marriage circles (Winslow Reference Winslow and Ensminger2002: 169–74), and attend their own temple, their interactions with other castes are few and on their own terms. Nonetheless, the “in that time” list reminds them that the world beyond the village holds the potential of disrespect or even incivility because they are Potters.
Names and the World
In the past, Walangama residents engaged the outside world infrequently. They rented lorries for religious pilgrimages, traveled to other Potter communities for weddings and funerals, and, during harvest season, took their bullock carts north to trade pots for rice. Otherwise, their lives were lived locally. Now, that has changed. Today Walangama traders travel widely in lorries to wholesale pottery; older children commute daily to town schools; and about a third of the households include someone with paid outside employment. In all of these contexts, they are identified by names, and many of the old names are identity-revealing.
Walangama names are composed of a patronymicFootnote 26 vāsagama name, abbreviated as initials, followed by a personal name; for example, M. N. (Madume Naidelagē) Punchihami. “Naidelagē” endings are associated with craft-making and artificer castes (Carter Reference Carter1965[1924]: 316). The most Potter-specific vāsagama name I encountered was J. B. (Jayakody Badahälagē), literally, Potter House Jayakody. By the 1970s, the J. B. vāsagama name was rare. In 1976, when a woman reported her elderly father’s name to me as J. B., he angrily insisted that I “cut it” from my notes; he had changed it to the more neutral J. A. (Jayakody Arachilagē).
Name changing in Walangama appears to have increased beginning around 1949, after the government introduced a pottery marketing co-operative and village men began selling pottery outside traditional territories (Winslow Reference Winslow2016: 218). It was never widespread. My surveysFootnote 27 suggest a frequency of under 10 percent for men and under 3 percent for women (Table 2).
Table 2. Percentage of names given at birth that were later changed.
The changes were accomplished by going to a local government office, registering the new name, and obtaining a new birth certificate. Some changed personal names, too. Nimal (born 1948) told me that he originally was named Bandianaide. When I asked him why he changed it, he responded, “You can’t go out into the world with a name like that!”
In 2013, a teenaged girl who attended a selective town secondary school explained to me with emphasis: “[In school], they don’t use initials. They read your whole name. And if the Miss reads some ‘naide,’ everyone looks!” So, her father went to the district offices and changed his and his children’s vāsagama names from K. N. (Kāluappu Naidelagē) to K. M. (Kāluappu Mudianselagē). He commented, “We value the N [for Naide] but the younger generation doesn’t so much.” This was one of the few instances I heard of a girl’s name being changed (Table 2). W. M. Amarasiri de Silva, who analyzed Sri Lanka-wide name changes between 1976 and 1995, also found it to be a predominantly (70 percent) male phenomenon (Reference de Silva2009: 82; also, Gunasinghe Reference Gunasinghe1990[1980]: 110–12), possibly out of expectation that men are more likely than women to be “going out into the world.” Today, the more problematic names are gone and name-changing in Walangama appears to be declining.
Two Worlds or One?
On the face of it, then, Walangama people live in two different caste worlds. In the village, they interact primarily with others of their kulaya. There, where they control the narrative, they receive outsiders confidently, happy to show off their impressive temple complex and be recognized as owners of prosperous pottery businesses. This world contains elements of the cartwheel: inherited occupation, acceptance of higher Goigama status, and little attention to calibrating comparative standings of non-Goigama kulaya. Outside the village, however, in the multi-kulaya worlds of school, trade, courts, and more, the situation is different. There people of different kulaya may be seen as intrinsically different, separated by heritage, and locatable in a linear hierarchy even though the cartwheel’s legacy means that there is no clear blueprint for doing so. Therefore, facing uncertainty and anticipating disrespect, Walangama people seek kulaya anonymity abroad.
And yet, is that divide really so clear-cut? When Walangama people told me that kulaya is carried in the blood, they were implying some degree of biological difference between people of one kulaya and people of another. This may leave them open to the ladder’s more elemental discriminations. For example, a young Walangama friend and I went to visit a well-off family in a village adjoining Walangama. When we arrived, my friend refused to enter the house; when offered refreshments, she accepted only water. “Why?” I asked her later, anticipating that the family’s wealth had made her uncomfortable. But I had misread her unease. Her problem was not class, it was caste. She had heard that the residents of that village were Durāva (traditionally, toddy-tapper) kulaya. Might this family be Durāva? Should she eat their food? She was troubled by possible incompatibilities, uncertain how to proceed in a situation she would not have been in if I had not led her to it. So, she opted out, remaining outside on the verandah sipping water while inside I feasted on cake and tea.
That was 1976. Since then, inter-kulaya contacts have become more common and more intimate. As noted, some Walangama residents have taken non-Potter spouses. They seem to fit easily into village life: their relatives visit and in at least one case, a Goigama woman’s marriage was followed by her brother, too, settling in Walangama with a Potter spouse. And yet, when outside the village, forebodings about inter-kulaya relationships persist. In 2013, a Walangama woman told me that her police officer son had married a Goigama colleague whose family remains ignorant of his Potter background. She worried that it might be necessary to stop having her son’s daughter to visit lest the child, just learning to talk, return home with tales of potters. That old background music echoes still.
Conclusion
Historian Nicholas Dirks wrote, “When we think of India, it is hard not to think of caste” (Reference Dirks2015: 83). One would not say that of Sinhala Sri Lanka. Sinhala caste is muted, unvoiced, rarely discussed openly—“shadowy,” Rogers once observed (Reference Rogers2004b: 645). But silence, name changing, and other avoidance tactics fail to subvert Sinhala caste’s attendant unease. Perhaps it is because the simple bivalent social structure of the ancient texts and the Kandyan Kingdom ill suit negotiating today’s more frequent inter-caste interactions while alternative linear models presume multiple, only vaguely specified inequalities that no one lives with easily. In any case, the gap between form and content looms increasingly large. Grounded as caste is in situated social relationships that shift over time and circumstance, why would we expect otherwise?
My exploration here has found that some features of Sinhala caste have persisted for centuries: a guild-like association between endogamous groups and occupations; a two-tiered stratification system; inattention to relative group-based status; and the assumption that all (or almost all) Sinhala people share a common humanity. What I have called “the cartwheel model” evolved in a time when, because of low population density, there was broad access to basic resources, particularly land, giving non-elite groups considerable economic autonomy.Footnote 28 Here, I have focused on the territory of the former Kandyan Kingdom but investigations of the low country suggest pre-colonial Sinhala systems that looked not much different (e.g., Dewasiri Reference Dewasiri2008: 93–95).
Other features clearly have shifted over time. Buddhism, introduced from the subcontinent and developed in interaction with Southeast Asia, countered but did not eliminate mainland Brahmanical influence. We saw it in the thirteenth-century emergence of caste in the monasteries and varṇa references in fourteenth-century boundary books. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Kandyan kings perfected the two-tiered cartwheel political economy that ignored the finer calibrations of Brāhmaṇism. But after the Kingdom fell in 1815, the more ladder-like Brahmanical model, as understood by the British, was reinforced by colonial policies that sometimes encouraged up-and-coming lower-status groups and at other times gave preference to the traditional elite as a “native aristocracy” (Dirks Reference Dirks2015; Wickramasinghe Reference Wickramasinghe2006: 49–50). Either way, caste was reified as a significant marker of identity despite official policy to the contrary.
How did ordinary rural people encounter these developments? Given the overwhelming prevalence of single-caste communities, it is likely that in pre-colonial times they did so largely through caste-specific exactions attached to land and religious participation at Buddhist temples and deity shrines. But under British colonial rule (1796–1948) and its land-hungry plantation economy, many Kandyan villages lost their former access to Crown lands even as population grew (Bandarage Reference Bandarage1983). Tax farming to fill colonial coffers, corvée labor to build colonial infrastructure, and increased dependence on imported foodstuffs and other goods pushed people into greater market engagement and inter-caste relationships while also empowering resource-controlling elites. As class distinctions became more salient, hierarchical caste culture apparently did as well (Gunasinghe Reference Gunasinghe1990[1980]: 43–70).
Today, Sinhala caste continues to take its place alongside ethnicity, gender, age, and other modes of pigeonholing people into hierarchically arranged boxes. Such “categorical distinctions” underpin systems of durable inequality everywhere. All of them, including caste, are grounded in differential access to political and economic resources. But, as we have seen, they also are scaffolded by replicating the same hierarchical scheme across multiple domains (Tilly Reference Tilly1998: 10). Rules for dress and speech, norms of endogamy, limited entrée to religious participation and schooling, the embodied effects of unequal access to food and health care, these and more create myriad distinctions between groups that reinforce, disguise, and normalize exploitative political economies. It is said that King Mahāsammata produced social order by the simple expedient of giving people different jobs. However, as the Vidānē Mahattea observed, other differences ensued.
In Walangama, memory of an earlier time’s scaffolding for inequality is preserved with the “in that time” list, even though the scaffolding itself has crumbled. On the one hand, the list is firmly tagged as history and the extent to which it ever affected behavior is unclear. Walangama residents did not lose the right to clear Crown lands for gardens until around 1940, and thereby retained some economic autonomy. Few children went to school and temple attendance was seasonal, so except for direct sales of pottery, interactions with higher castes were limited. A cartwheel-derived understanding of caste would have had few challenges. On the other hand, “the list” with its harsh evocations of incompatible differences between people retains power to unsettle, keeping alive an alternative understanding of their place in the world.
Yet Walangama people do not live as if stranded between two incompatible models of how caste once was. They may have to toggle between the two, but they live in the all-consuming, multi-dimensional flow of daily life in the present, rarely facing head-on any inconsistencies between what they believe to be true about themselves and what they fear some in the outside world might think. When they do, when kulaya emerges from the shadows and their own practical understanding of how the world works forewarns them of potentially uncomfortable encounters, they employ avoidance strategies—changing names, sipping water on the verandah, forgoing a granddaughter’s visits, whatever is needed. These improvisations do not in themselves resolve conflicts or create new norms, but they do provide the flexibility and fuzziness that make social life possible and that may, over time, produce new expectations (Lamaison and Bourdieu Reference Lamaison and Bourdieu1986: 118; Yalman Reference Yalman and Leach1960: 78). The codes of the past are carried forward but only because their implementation is adjusted to meet the needs of the present.
This, ultimately, is Sinhala caste and, most probably, any system of durable inequality in practice: not a set of ancient rules to be obeyed or resisted, but contemporary relationships to be negotiated and then negotiated again. Sinhala caste is not and seems never to have been neatly and finally formed, a system diagrammable in clear dark lines as, for example, cartwheels or ladders. Rather, it emerges anew at each encounter through strategically reworked social interactions, descended from a complicated past but not determined by it.
Acknowledgments
Research was funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) Cultural Anthropology Program (1974–1976, 1992); NSF’s Long Term Professional Development leave program (2013); the American Institute for Sri Lankan Studies (2003–2004); the University of New Hampshire (2004); and the United States-Sri Lanka Fulbright Commission (2013). Shirani Pothuhera and Sunimal Senanayake have provided essential fieldwork assistance over many years. Writing was done as a Senior Scholar at the School for Advanced Research, Santa Fe, New Mexico, with the collegial support of President Michael Brown, Scholar Programs Director Paul Ryer, librarian Katherine Wolf, and fellow Scholars—Carol MacLennan, Wenda Trevathan, and the late Nancy Owen Lewis. I am also grateful to J. Stephen Lansing, John D. Rogers, R. L. Stirrat, Gabriel Winslow-Yost, and the anonymous CSSH reviewers who generously read and commented on essay drafts. As always, opinions, findings, and conclusions expressed here are mine alone and do not necessarily reflect views of funders or readers.
