PFAFFENBERGER, BRYAN, The Harsh Facts of Hydraulics: Technology and Society in Sri Lanka’s Colonization Schemes, Technology and Culture, 31:3 (1990-July) Extracted fiom PC/ Full Text, published by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. The Harsh Facts of Hydraulics: Technology and Society in Sri Lanka’s Colonization Schemes BRYAN PFAFFENBERGER From the close of the First World War to the present, the govern- ment of Sri Lanka (formerly Ceylon) has attempted a series of ambitious irrigation and resettlement projects, called “colonization schemes” in the literature.' These projects seek to settle landless Sri Lankan “peasants” in Sri Lanka's sparsely populated Dry Zone, where ancient Buddhist civilizations once flourished in valleys watered by rivers flowing from the central mountain massif. (See fig. 1.) The colonization schemes have several goals, including achieving self- sufficiency in rice production and preserving the traditional peas- antry by insulating it from the evils of a society deformed by colonialism. Although such schemes have substantially increased Sri Lanka's rice output, they have almost uniformly failed to achieve their social goals. Indeed, they seem inclined to reproduce (rather than De Prarrexuencen, an anthropologist, is associate professor in the Division of Humanities, School of Engineering and Applied Science, University of Virginia, and the chairman of the Sri Lanka Studies Group (an affiliate organization of the Association for Asian Studies). He thanks the School of Engineering and Applied Science, University of Virginia, for summer support that aided the drafting of this essay, and also thanks the Technology and Culture reviewers, whose constructive criticism, helped clarify the issues this article raises. "For a general survey, see B. H. Farmer, Pioneer Peasant Cultivation in Ceylon (Oxford, 1957), and his more recent "The Origins of Agricultural Colonisation in the Dry Zone of Sri Lanka in John Farrington, Frederick Abeyratne, and Gerald J. Gil, Farm Power ‘and Employment in Asia: Performance and Prospects (Colombo, 1984), pp. 224-38. See Nihal Amerasinghe, “An Overview of Settlement Schemes in Sri Lanka,” Asian Survey 32 (1982): 620-36, for a review of recent settlement experiments and their outcomes. Land Commision: Interim Report, Sessional Paper No. 2 of 1998, p. 19. “Peasants” are defined (p. 10) as persons who “cultivate land by [their own} labour with or without the aid of paid labour” on newly irrigated lands “outside their native villages.” On the shortcomings of colonization schemes, ee the stinging criticisms in the Report of the Gal Oya Evaluation Comite, Sessional Paper No. | of 1970, and the perceptive analysis of water management problems by Robert Chambers, Water Management and Paddy Production inthe Dry Zone of Sri Lanka (Colombo, 1975), © 1990 by the Society for the History of Technology. All rights reserved. (0040-165X/90/3103-0007S01.00 361 Copyright (c) 2003 ProQuest Information and Learning Company Copyright (c) Johns Hopkins UiCopyright (c) 2003 ProQuest Information and Learning Comp: 362 Bryan Pfaffenberger ameliorate) the worst aspects of Sri Lankan peasant society, such as indebtedness, land fragmentation, sharecropping on a massive scale, socioeconomic differentiation, and low agricultural productivity. Joining a chorus of voices raised in protest against the ill effects of Western technology in Third World societies, some observers suggest that these problems might be attributed to the unavoidable social effects of gravity-flow irrigation technology itself, which seems to entail an inevitable differentiation process given by the brute realities of water's nature—particularly the fact that the peasants at the top end receive water more regularly and in greater amounts than the peasants at the tail end. The differentiating potential of the technol- Hu Country Elevation over 900 me MME Elevation over 1800 m1 50 km Fic, 1.—Sri Lanka's climatic zones Copyright (c) Johns Hopkins University PressTechnology and Society in Sri Lanka's Colonization Schemes 363 ogy is accentuated by the use of high-yielding rice varieties, fertilizers, herbicides, and pesticides, which only the richer peasants can afford. Because such varieties require expensive inputs such as herbicides and fertilizer, they benefit the rich farmers far more than they benefit, the poor ones, thus exacerbating rural stratification.‘ For Third World titics of Western technology, the differentiating effects of gravity- flow irrigation schemes and Green Revolution technology amount to a Trojan horse: a Third World country imports Western technology to improve social welfare on an equitable basis, only to find that the technology insidiously reproduces the class structure and class rela- tions of capitalism.’ The result is a class of rural capitalists created by the state. This class commercializes agriculture, expands its landhold- ings at the expense of poorer colonists, and fosters the growth of a pauperized or landless rural peasantry. Pointing to this differentiation process, critics of Western technical assistance ask whether improve- ments in productivity are worth the high cost of rural impoverish- ment Such thinking is behind a growing resistance to Western- backed technical innovations in agriculture at precisely the time when the world’s burgeoning population may need Western technical assist ance more than ever. The critics of gravity-flow irrigation schemes sketch a plausible portrait in accord with technological determinism, the doctrine that deems the effects of a technology to be so rooted in the imperatives of ‘For critiques of the Green Revolution generally, see Jeffrey M. Paige, Agrarian Revolution: Social Movements and Export Agriculture in the Underdeveloped World (New York, 1975); Keith Griffin, The Political Economy of Agrarian Change: An Essay on the Green Revolution (Cambridge, Mas., 1974); and Carl H. Gotsch, “Technical Change and the Distribution of Income in Rural Areas;" American Journal of Agricultural Economics 54 (1972): 826—41. For studies of South Asian communities, see Nihal Amerasinghe, “The Impact of High-Vielding Varieties of Rice on a Settlement Scheme in Ceylon,” Modern Colon Studies 8 (1972): 19-85; and C. Geoffrey Swenson, “The Distribution of Benefits from Increased Rice Production in Thanjavur District, South India,” Indian Journal of Agricultural Economics 81 (1976): 1-12. *E.g., Susantha Goonatilake, “Technology as a Social Gene,” Journal of Scientific and Industral Research 38 (1979): 339-54 *E.g.,V.I. Lenin, The Development of Capitalism in Russia (Moscow, 1956). pp. 177-78. For South Asia, see Francis Frankel, India’s Green Revolution: Economic Gains and Political Casts (Bombay, 1971); C. H. H. Rao, Technological Change and Distribution of Gains in Indian Agriculture (Delhi, 1975); and B. Dasgupta, “India's Green Revolution.” Economic ‘and Political Weekly 12 (1977): 241-60. For Sri Lanka, see Satchi Ponnambalam, Dependent Capitalism in Crisis: The Sri Lankan Economy, 1948-1980 (London, 1980), pp. 62—78; and N. Shanmugaratnam, “Some Aspects of the Evolution and Implemen- tation of the Policy of Peasant Resettlement in the Dry Zone of Sri Lanka, 1930 to the Present,” in Charles Abeysekera, ed., Capital and Peasant Production: Studies in the Continuity and Discontinuity of Agrarian Structures in Sri Lanka (Colombo, 1985), p. 81. Copyright (c) 2003 ProQuest Information and Learning Comp: Copyright (c) Johns Hopkins University Press364 Bryan Pfaffenberger nature that they lie beyond the control of human choice and values.” And Sri Lanka’s experience with colonization schemes is widely cited as a textbook example of the “inevitable” equity problems associated with gravity-flow irrigation technology." This article argues, however, that the supposed causal relationship between gravity-flow irrigation works and socioeconomic differentiation is, in the Sri Lankan case, illusory and deceptive. The appearance is created, and becomes convincing, only to the extent that observers adopt a highly restricted definition of technology, a definition that includes only the hardware of irrigation (such as dams, pumps, and canals). As scholars in the history of technology frequently argue, a more useful definition of technology would certainly include cultural values and social behav- iors, which are, after all, vital to the operation and maintenance of a technical system.” Stripped of its cultural and social content, irrigation technology can indeed be made to appear as if it were an inhuman juggernaut, forcing human lives into the mold of capitalist class relations despite all efforts to the contrary. Yet people’s lives are not necessarily so easily shaped by the flow of water. The traditional village irrigation systems of Sri Lanka itself show that customs and social behaviors can mitigate or cancel the stratifying effects of gravity-flow irrigation technology. The question this article addresses, therefore, is not why Sri Lanka's modern irrigation technology creates socioeconomic dif- ferentiation; on the contrary, the question is why the schemes’ social design omitted the customs and behaviors that could have mitigated the differentiation process. As historians of technology frequently point out, a technological system does not stem purely from the inexorable, inner logic of nature as it unfolds in technical form; on the contrary, °On technological determinism generally, see Jacques Ellul, “The Technological Order,” Technology and Culture 3 (1962): 394—421; and Leslie A. White, The Evolution of Culture (Chicago, 1972). Such views are summarized and critiqued in John Stauden- maier, Technology's Storytellers: Reweaving the Human Fabric (Cambridge, Mass., 1985); and Langdon Winner, Aufonomous Technology: Technics Out-ofControl as a Theme in Political Thought (Cambridge, Mass., 197). ‘For examples of such citations, see D. W. Bromley, D. C. Taylor, and D. E. Parker, “Water Reform and Economic Development: Institutional Aspects of Water Manage- ‘ment in Developing Countries,” Economic Development and Cultural Change 28 (1980): 365-87; Randolph Barker, “Barriers to Efficient Capital Investment in Agriculture,” in T. W. Schultz, ed., Distortions of Agricultural Incentives (Bloomington, Ind., 1978); Melvin D. Skold, Shinnawi Abdel Aty El Shinnawi, and M. Lofty Nast, “Irrigation Water Distribution along Branch Canals in Egypt: Economic Effects," Economic Development ‘and Cultural Change 82 (1984): 547-67. °This point is well argued by Arnold Pacey, The Culture of Technology (Cambridge, ‘Mass., 1983), pp. 1~12. Copyright (c) 2003 ProQuest Information and Learning Comp: Copyright (c) Johns Hopkins University PressTechnology and Society in Sri Lanka’s Colonization Schemes 365 its form stems from choices that people make when the technology is created or transferred." To understand why Sri Lanka's modern irrigation systems reproduce the structure of capitalist class relations, then, one must ask who chose to design and transfer the systems that way—and why. The facile way to deal with these questions is to blame the engineers involved in the project for their shortsightedness or tunnel vision with respect to the social dimension of irrigation technology. And itis quite true that, so far as these engineers are concerned, their job involves only creating well-designed and reliable dams and canais; the man- agement of water and socioeconomic differentiation, in their view, is a “people problem” that lies beyond their professional responsibilities (and competence)."' Yet this article will demonstrate that the social design of Sri Lanka's irrigation systems was not a creation of these engineers. On the contrary, this social design was created by British public servants during the colonial period; a supremely peculiar artifact, it was socially constructed in the face of a variety of con- straints, ranging from paternalism to a broad-based colonial crusade against traditional forms of land tenure. Subsequently, it was adopted. without question and promoted zealously by the nationalist Sri Lankan political elite, the members of which had much to gain politically from the design the British had created. They continued to promote this design, in fact, long after it was made clear to them that, the design was gravely flawed, and the engineers—believing the whole question was beyond the bounds of their professional competence— continued to create systems that incorporated the British design. As the pages to follow will demonstrate, the tunnel vision of Western engineering, its inattention to the social and cultural dimensions of technology, provides a resource that Third World political elites may very well find of immense political value. "On the social shaping of technological systems generally, see D. MacKenzie and J. Wajeman, “Introduction,” in MacKenzie and Wajeman, eds., The Social Shaping of Technology: How the Refrigerator Got Its Hum (Philadelphia, 1985), pp. 1-25. On the role of choice in the design process, see David Noble, Forces of Production: A Social History of Design Automation (New York, 1986). On the social processes that influence one design ‘choice over another, see T. Pinch and W. Bijker, “The Social Construction of Facts and Artefacts, Or, How the Sociology of Science and the Sociology of ‘Technology Might Benefit Each’ Other.” in W. E. Bijker, T. P. Hughes, and T. Pinch, eds., The Social Construction of Technological Systems (Cambridge, Mass., 1987), pp. 17-50. On the “black boxing” of technical systems and artifacts after stabilization occurs, see Bruno Latour, ‘Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society (Cambridge, Mass, 1987), pp. 103-44 or a classic example of this thinking, see A. Maheshwaran, “Engineer's Role in ‘Water Management,” Jalavrhudi 1 (December 1976): 48-54. Copyright (c) 2003 ProQuest Information and Learning Comp: Copyright (c) Johns Hopkins University Press366 Bryan Pfaffenberger Dry Zone Colonization: An Introduction Receiving an annual rainfall of less than 75 inches per year and covering about 60 percent of Sri Lanka’s land area, the Dry Zone has long been seen as the key to solving several problems, including overcrowding in the populous Wet Zone, insufficient rice production, the exploitation of peasants by village moneylenders (mudalatis), excessive fragmentation of rice plot holdings, increasing economic stratification in rice-growing communities, and growing peasant land- lessness. And the Dry Zone itself bears a potent lure: within it are the ruins of the great irrigation-based civilization of antiquity, the Sinhala Buddhist civilizations of Anuradhapura and Pollunaruva, with their prodigious (and technically impressive) network of dams and canals."" Sri Lankan rulers have generally agreed with the Earl of Carnarfon who, on learning of the greatness of these ruined works, wrote in 1866 that it would be a “reproach on civilization and government if. {such] great and princely works [were allowed to] lie neglected longer than absolutely necessary.” The idea of Dry Zone colonization has found advocates—both Sri Lankan and foreign—for more than a century. The first attempts of the British colonial government to establish such schemes, however, foundered owing to the Dry Zone’s unhealthy reputation; it was dangerous and malarial, and the British developed several projects only to find that they could persuade no peasants to take up the newly irrigated lands." Dry Zone colonization received renewed impetus during the latter phase of the British colonial regime (1931—48), when Ceylon was internally governed by a joint Ceylonese and British legislative council. Colonization in earnest, however, had to await the 1945 onset of DDT spraying. Since that time, the Sri Lankan govern- ment has constructed dozens of new irrigation works and refurbished old ones. The government's interest in Dry Zone colonization has been matched by spending commitments. Spending on such projects has consumed as much as 87 percent of the country’s annual agricultural budget. By 1970, state-sponsored colonization schemes contained "On the irrigation works of classical Sri Lanka, see R. L. Brohier, Ancient Irrigation Works in Ceylon (Colombo, 1984); C. W. Nicholas, “A Short Account of the History of Irrigation Works Up to the Eleventh Century” Journal of the Ceylon Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, n.s. 7 (1960): 43-69; and Nicholas, “The Irrigation Works of King Parakramabahu 1,” Ceylon Historical Journal 4 (1954-55): 52-68, “Colonial Office (hereafter CO) (Public Records Office, Kew, London), 54/424 (no. 8), Robinson to Carnarfon, minute by Carnarfon, January 9, 1967 MB. H. Farmer, “The Origins of Agricultural Colonisation in the Dry Zone of Sri Lanka,” in Farrington, Abeyratne, and Gill (n. 1 above), p. 5 Copyright (c) 2003 ProQuest Information and Learning Comp: Copyright (c) Johns Hopkins University PressTechnology and Society in Sri Lanka's Colonization Schemes 367 210,000 acres of paddy, one-sixth of the country’s entire rice-growing acreage. By 1974, the independent government had spent nearly Rs 4 billion on such projects, and, by 1980, nearly one hundred thousand families had been settled on one-half million acres of newly irrigated land.'* Dwarfing all past efforts, however, is the massive program now under way to develop the 4,000-square-mile basin of the Mahaweli Ganga, the nation’s longest river. Begun in 1970, the project was originally intended to bring 900,000 acres under irrigation, generate more than 500 megawatts of electrical power, and provide new homes for 225,000 families." The scaled-down version (called the Acceler- ated Mahaweli Project) seeks to settle some 140,000 families on 320,000 acres of newly irrigated land.” What troubles many Sri Lankans about this massive effort is that the economic and social results of past colonization schemes are, to say the least, far from encouraging.” The pre-Mahaweli projects consis- tently fail to meet their production goals and, in consequence, do not repay the massive investment the Colombo government has made in them." What is even more discouraging about the colonization schemes, however, is their failure to meet their social goals, namely, to create egalitarian communities of peasant owner-proprietors. At the Minipe scheme, for example: a few colonists achieve high incomes and high living standards amid a mass of settlers who eke out a day-to-day existence. Lack of saving habits and a subsistence orientation help to exacerbate the poverty of the poorer groups and leave them vulnerable in the face of drought or a fail in the price of paddy. Such minor disasters lead the poor to lease or rent their lands [illegally and "The figures are drawn from Ponnambalam (n. 6 above), p. 50; Martin E. Gold, Law ‘and Social Change: A Study of Land Reform in Sri Lanka (New York, 197), pp. 57, 122. "United Nations Development Program and Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations, Mahaweli Ganga Irrigation and Hydropower Surves, Ceylon, Final Report, vols. | and 3 (Rome, 1969). "Jan Ludqyist, “Irrigation Development and Central Control: Some Features of Sri Lankan Development,” in I. Norlund, S. Gederroth, and I. Gerdin, eds., Rice Socieis ‘Asian Problems and Prospets (London, 1986), p. 61 See, for instances of this concern, Ponnamabalam (n. 6 above), pp. 155-57, and Mallory E, Wijesinghe, Sri Lanka's Development Thrust (Colombo, 1981), pp. 50-57. "S, Amunugama, “Chandrikawewa: A Recent Attempt at Colonization on a Peasant Framework." Colon Journal of Historical and Social Studies 8 (1965): 130-62; Chambers (n. 3 above); H. N. C, Fonseka, “Problems of Agriculture in the Gal-Oya (Left Bank) Peasant Colony.” Modern Ceylon Studies 2 (1971): 69-75; J. Jogaratnam and R. Schikle, Summary Report of the Socio-Economic Survey of the Nine Colonization Schemes in Ceylon (Peradeniya, Sri Lanka, 1969); R. D. Wanigaratne, The Minipe Colonization Scheme: An Appraisal (Colombo, 1979). Copyright (c) 2003 ProQuest Information and Learning Comp: Copyright (c) Johns Hopkins University Press368 Bryan Pfaffenberger covertly] to the more fortunate households. The already affluent become richer and the poor become increasingly dependent on them for survival. But at the same time as the poor are obliged to lease out their own lands on unfavorable terms, others of their numbers pay high rents—reaching 50% of the crops—to obtain cultivation rights on land owned by wealthy landowners and traders. Some work as . . . tenants on their own lands which have been mortgaged to the rich.” A variety of explanations for such developments have been offered, but perhaps the most compelling is the technological determinist view taken by M. P. Moore and his colleagues, who attribute the schemes’ disappointing performance to what they term the “harsh facts of hydraulics”: the inherent economic disparities that are built into gravity-flow irrigation technology. Used in the pre-Mahaweli schemes, this technology employs gravity-flow irrigation structures that capture river water in reservoirs, conveying it to rice-growing areas via very long distributory and field channels that are designed to command as. large an area as possible (see fig. 2). Although cheap to construct, such works create inequities between top-end and tail-end cultivators: “Top-ender” and “tail-ender” refer broadly to the distance, on gravity flow irrigation schemes, between the farmer's irrigated plot and the point at which water is issued into the channel system. ‘This distance is, everything else being equal, a good indicator of the farmer's access to irrigation water. . . . For two reasons, “top- enders” almost always obtain more water per unit of land than “tail-enders,” and thus enjoy more success in their cultivation. The first reason is that the volume and pressure of water in irrigation channels is greater at the top ends. Even without human inter- ference, the harsh facts of hydraulics favor “top-enders.” The second and related reason is that it is physically much easier for “top-enders” rather than “tail-enders” to poach or steal from the irrigation channels more than their alloted share of water. Unequal access to irrigation water is the major single cause of socioeconomic inequality between top-enders and tail-enders.” ®R. D, Wanigaratne, "A Peasant Settlement in the Dry Zone,” in Barry M. Morriso M. P. Moore, and M. U. Ishak Lebbe, eds., The Disintegrating Village? Social Change in Rural Sri Lanka (Colombo, 1981), p. 146; see also Wanigaratne (n. 19 above), p. 42 1M. R. Moore, Approaches to Improving Water Management on Large-Scale Irrigation Schemes in Sri Lanka (Colombo, 1980), p. 3. For a comprehensive statement of this viewpoint, see M. P. Moore, F. Abeyratne, R. Amarakoon, and J. Farrington, “Space and the Generation of Socio-Economic Inequality on Sri Lanka's Irrigation Schemes,” ‘Marga 7 (1983): 1~133. Copyright (c) 2003 ProQuest Information and Learning Compan Copyright (c) Johns Hopkins University Press370 Bryan Pfaffenberger In identifying the “harsh facts of hydraulics” as the principal cause of stratification in colonization schemes, Moore and his colleagues echo the growing Third World condemnation of Western-backed technical innovations in agriculture. Does their thesis have a foun- dation in fact? Although it cannot be denied that gravity-flow irrigation systems distribute water inequitably, studies of traditional irrigation practices—those rooted in centuries of custom—show that countervailing customs can nullify the differentiating potential of gravity-flow irrigation technology" Studies elsewhere show, similarly, that Green Revolution technology (fertilizers, pesticides, and high- yielding rice varieties) does not necessarily produce socioeconomic differentiation, so long as countervailing customs assure the equita- ble use of agricultural inputs."* As William Kelly reminds us, “forms of irrigation organization are . . . too frequently attributed directly to ‘natural facts of water’... rather than to the variable cultural meanings of those natural and technical ‘facts’ for the social actors in a given setting.” Remarkably, the evidence about traditional village irrigation sys- tems in Sri Lanka itself provides even more evidence in support of this point—and what is more, it helps to elucidate the structural principle by which equity can be maintained in the face of gravity-flow irrigation technology's stratifying potential. These systems allocated rights to water, not to land. If Sri Lanka's modern irrigation works are associated with socioeconomic differentiation, then, the reason cannot n to gravity-flow irrigation technology. On the contrary, it must be attributed to the social and historical processes that stripped this technology of the social design that could have contributed to its equitable operation. On the role of custom in mitigating the stratifying effects of gravty-flow technology in traditional irrigation systems, see E. Walter Coward, Jr, “Principles of Socal ‘Organization in an Indigenous Irrigation System,” Human Orgoniatin 38 (1979): 35 On the rise of such customs in a government-sponsored irrigation project, see Richard H. Goldman and Lyn Squire, “Technical Change, Labor Use, and Income Distribution in the Muda Irrigation Project,” Economic Development and Cultural Change 30 (1982) 158-76 For a study that questions the inevitability of socioeconomic differentiation in irrigation projects, see Donald W. Attwood, “Why Some of the Poor Get Richer: Economic Change and Mobility in Rural Western India” Curren Anthropology 20 (1979) 495-514. On the role of countervailing customs in mitigating inequality in ivigation projects, see Goldman and Squire (n. 22 above) *"Concepts in the Anthropological Study of Irrigation," American Anthropologist 85 (1983): 881 Copyright (c) 2003 ProQuest Information and Learning Comp: Copyright (c) Johns Hopkins University PressTechnology and Society in Sri Lanka's Colonization Schemes 371 Rights to Water: The Traditional Pattern The great Sinhala Buddhist civilizations of the Dry Zone collapsed centuries before the Europeans’ arrival, and the large-scale irrigation systems created by the Buddhist kings had fallen into disrepair and disuse. Still extant in colonial times, however, were thousands of small-scale village irrigation systems. Characteristic of such systems was a one tank-one village pattern, in which the tank (wewa), the village (gama), and the Buddhist shrine (dagoba) constituted a closely integrated system, regulated far more by custom and religion than by coercion. Dwelling as they did on land that was symbolically “owned” by the king,” the villagers owed him service, called rajakariya, which frequently (and congenially) amounted to self-help: for the high castes, the major community responsibility was the maintenance of village irrigation works. Since most villages were the domicile of a single caste, there was no barrier to the full emergence of a frankly egalitarian village ideology—and, as John D’Oyly observes, there was little incentive for the high castes to acquire low-caste land, since vested in that land was the requirement to serve the king in a caste-specific (and demeaning) way.” Such villages preserved the egalitarian spirit of Sri Lanka's traditional irrigation customs intact well into the 19th century, and in some cases even later. To be sure, the historical evidence about these surviving customs, which was provided mainly by British colonial officials, is colored by the English penchant to romanticize the village as a self-sufficient, egalitarian, democratic, and morally integrated community of self- respecting peasants, who are altogether to be preferred to the rowdy masses in cities.” (This penchant is observable from the earliest times: the English sailor Robert Knox, who was captured and held prisoner by the king of the Kandyan kingdom in the 17th century, praised the Sinhala peasant in these terms: “Take a ploughman from the plough A. Abeysinghe, “Historical Evidence of Water Management in Ancient Sri Lanka; Economic Review 6 (SeptemberiOctober 1980): 6 *W. L. Siiweera, “The Theory of the King’s Ownership of the Land in Ancient Ceylon: An Essay in Historical Revision,” Ceylon Journal of Historical and Social Sciences 1 (ag7: 48-61 "John S. D'Oyly, A Sheth of the Consitution ofthe Kandyan Kingdom (Colombo, 1929), pp. 44, 93 Compare, e., Martin J. Wiener, English Culture and the Decline ofthe Industrial Spirit, 1850-1980 (Harmondsworth, 1988), pp. 50 ff, and Vijaya Samaraweera, “Litigation, Sir Henry Maine's Writings, and the Ceylon Village Community Ordinance of 1871," in L. Prematilleke, K. Indrapala, and J. E. Van Lohuizen-De Leeuw, eds., The Senerat Poranavitana Commemoration Volune (Leiden, 1978), pp. 199-213. Copyright (c) 2003 ProQuest Information and Learning Comp: Copyright (c) Johns Hopkins University Press372 Bryan Pfaffenberger and wash off his dirt and he is fit to rule a kingdom.”)” Even while bearing the limitations of such evidence in mind, however, there is sufficient information on precolonial and postcolonial irrigation customs to suggest a consistent pattern: these customs muted socio economic differentiation in irrigation-based communities by (1) allo- cating rights to water, not land, and (2) assuring regular means by which new communities could be created after population increased. Epigraphical and literary evidence suggests that the irrigation settlements of the ancient civilizations were founded on strong norms of equity in the distribution of water. These norms “ensured that one individual did not obtain an advantage to which he was not entitled and that the maximum benefit was derived from the cultivation.” In settlements worked by Buddhist monasteries, for instance, all the men in the village community were considered to be joint proprietors of the “water in the reservoir.” The water flowing through channels was, also considered common property, and the maintenance in good repair of dams.and channels was a community responsibility. In the dry season, when water from the reservoir and channels is required for the crops, water was allocated by turns. Any attempt to subvert the allocation was defined as a crime and held the criminal liable for payment of prosecution and expulsion from the monastic order.” Such evidence from classical antiquity might be dismissed as irrelevant, since it stems not from secular society but from monastic life, were it not for its strong resemblance to secular peasant customs observed in the early colonial period. Early attempts by British observers to record the “constitution” of the Kandyan kingdom of the central highlands, which the British brought down in 1815, stressed the obligation (rajakariya) of villagers to serve the king by maintaining irrigation works in good repair; village councils could mete out corporal punishment on the king’s behalf if farmers refused to cooperate in such self-beneficial maintenance work. Bound as it was to caste-specific services, rajakariya offended British principles of social justice, and it was officially abolished in 1832. A major and unwanted consequence, however, was the rapid deterioration of dams and channels, and the even less desirable onset of protracted litigation as Quoted (with evident approval) by Tilak Hetiarachehy, The Sinhala Peasant in a Changing Society: Ecological Change among the Sinhala Peasants from 1796 ab to 1909 an (Colombo, 1982), p. 41 “Ibid., p. 163. *'Samantapasadika, trans. S. Paranavitana, “Some Regulations concerning Village Irrigation in Ancient Ceylon,” Ceylon Journal of Historial and Social Sciences (1958): 4 *Ibid., pp. 45. Copyright (c) 2003 ProQuest Information and Learning Comp: Copyright (c) Johns Hopkins University PressTechnology and Society in Sri Lanka's Colonization Schemes 373 villagers squabbled (often violently) over diminishing water supplies.” As a result, some British officials, with the encouragement of Sir Henry George Ward, Ceylon’s governor from 1855 to 1860, under- took minute investigations of traditional irrigation customs with a view toward formulating legislation to restore the old spirit of village cooperation. One such investigation was undertaken by Ward's son- in-law, John Bailey, the capable and popular assistant government agent of Badulla District in the central highlands. Bailey's study was stimulated, he recounts, by the “melancholy” panorama of deteriorating and abandoned villages in the Kandyan highlands.™ Sufficient evidence of traditional irrigation customs re- mained, however, for Bailey to adduce its ten principles, which were remarkably reminiscent of the classical monastic pattern. All propri- etors of paddy plots, for instance, were jointly responsible for the maintenance of the water supply, and the village council could enforce sanctions against those who shirked their responsibilities (or damaged dams or channels for selfish gain). What is particularly interesting about Bailey's material, however, is his discovery of a cultural distinction between top-end and tail-end plots, which he rendered (respectively) as moolata (root fields) and agata (end fields), and of cultural practices that muted the economic liabilities of tail-end holdings. The interests of tail-enders were protected because agata or tail-end plots were plowed and watered first, the water subsequently being diverted by rotation progressively toward the top end of the reservoir; watering a field out of turn was ipso facto theft. Further- more, in seasons where insufficient water was available to water both top-end and tail-end plots, the top-end (moolata) holdings were temporarily redistributed among all top-end and tail-end holders so that everyone could benefit in proportion to his share in the field as awhole. Such principles show clearly that landholdings in an irrigated field did not really amount to landownership in the Western sense, but rather a kinship-based share (called pangu) in the community's water resources. Even allowing for Bailey's quintessentially English tendency to romanticize ancient customs, it seems indisputable that CO 54/328, enclosure “Report on the Patipola-aar” in dispatch of Ward to Labouchere, February 27, 1857; CO 54/438, enclosure “Depopulation of the Vanni District,” in dispatch of Hodgson to Duke of Buckingham, December 24, 1868; and CO 154/432, enclosure “Report of the Irrigation Committee,” in dispatch of Robinson 10 Duke of Buckingham, January 14, 1868. “Report on Irrigation,” in Speeches and Minutes of the Late Sir Henry George Ward ‘with Other Papers Connected with His Administration of the Government of Ceylon, 18551860 (Colombo, 1864), p. 98. Copyright (c) 2003 ProQuest Information and Learning Comp: Copyright (c) Johns Hopkins University Press374 Bryan Pfaffenberger such customs could be attributed only to the wisdom and, as he put it, the “experience of centuries.” ‘Twentieth-century anthropological studies corroborate the essen- tial point of this system (namely, that it established equitable rights to water), although much regional variation is apparent."* Every holding in the well-watered Upper Field of the Northern Province village called Pul Eliya, for instance, was observed by Edmund Leach in the 1950s to be matched by a corresponding plot in the less advanta- geously situated Lower Field. A villager could not simply sell off his Lower Field holdings in favor of those in the Upper Field; they were irretrievably linked in all transactions, including inheritance. In effect, the land tenure system did not function so much to allocate land as it did to allocate water, and it operated so that each share (pangu) of village land was entitled to a water allocation precisely equal to those allocated to all other shares. During times of water scarcity, especially in the dry season, the village, in a practice called bethma, collectively decided to cultivate a smaller portion of the whole field, again with steps taken to ensure ‘equal access to water by each shareholder. Commenting on the tradi- tional system, Leach notes correctly that a share (pangu) was “an equal share in a corporation,” like a modern stock market share, which entitles one toa share of the dividends (but not to control of any specific part of the company's real property). Echoing Leach’s conclusions, ‘Obeyesekere notes that “the characteristic of pangu is that. . . they are ‘floating, rather than irrevocably attached to a particular unit of land.” Thus informed by the researches of Bailey and other colonial observers, and with Ward's leadership, the colonial government implemented the Paddy Lands Irrigation Ordinance (No. 9) of 1856, which restored to village headmen and councils the sanctions needed to compel communal cooperation in the maintenance of irrigation structures and the equitable distribution of water. Flexible provisions were made, too, for the enactment of additional local customs as needed and as ratified by local farmers’ organizations in consultation with a colonial official. Welcomed by the peasantry and considered successful by the colonial government, the ordinance (with a few “Cf. Edmund R. Leach, “Village Irrigation in the Dry Zone of Sri Lanka,” in E, Walter Coward, ed, Irigaion and Agricultural Development in Asia: Perspectives from the Social Sciences (Ithaca, N.Y, 1980), p. 116; and Gananath Obeyesckere, Land Tenure in Village Ceylon: A Socal and Historical Study (Cambridge, 1967). “Leach (n. 85 above), p. 149, citing H.W. Codrington, Ancient Land Tenure and Revenue in Ceylon (Colombo, 1938, *Obeyesckere (n. 35 above), p. 18. Copyright (c) 2003 ProQuest Information and Learning Comp: Copyright (c) Johns Hopkins University PressTechnology and Society in Sri Lanka's Colonization Schemes 375 subsequent amendments) became part of British Ceylon’s colonial legal heritage.” Even so, grounds exist for arguing that the ordinance did not really accomplish its aim, which was to preserve traditional irrigation customs, but rather changed them unwittingly according to ‘Western notions of political power and land tenure. ‘The major palpable effect of the ordinance in most villages was to restore to village irrigation headmen (vel vidane) the right to compel villagers to maintain irrigation works—a right that the British had themselves taken away when royal service (rajakariya) was abolished. In most cases, however, there appears to have been scant attention paid to restoring traditional customs of land tenure—a move, anyway, that would have proved singularly unpopular in British colonial circles, which consistently held that unclear land titles were preventing Cey- lonese farmers from making needed capital investments in the land they farmed. And in viewing the headman’s offices as secular offices, the ordinance may have misinterpreted them in yet another way, as 19th-century observations of threshing-floor ceremonies suggest.” “The offices established under the ordinance persisted until 1958 when, amid accusations that these offices had fallen under the control of rich landowners, they were abolished by the 1958 Paddy Lands Reform Act. On the social history of the Paddy Lands Irrigation Ordinance, see Michael Roberts, “The Paddy Lands Irrigation ‘Ordinance and the Revival of Traditional Irrigation Customs, 1856-1871," Colon Journal of Historical and Socal Studies 10 (1967): 114~80; Michael Roberts, “Irrigation Policy in Brish Ceylon during the Nineteenth Century” South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies (1972): 47-63; B. Bastiampillai, “The Revival of Irrigation Enterprise in Geylon, 1870 to 18907 Ceylon Journal of Hisrical and Socal Studies 10 (1967): 126. On the ceremonies of the threshing floor, see D. J. Abeyratne, "Paddy or Rice Cultivation in Ceylon,” Tropical Agrculturalst 25 (1905-06): 569-75; A. Ashmore, “Paddy Cukivation in Ceylon,” Tropical Aricuturaist 30 (1908): 269-74; H.C. P Bell, “Paddy Culkivation Ceremonies in the Four Korales” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society (Covlon Branch) 11 (1889): 167—71; Bell, "Sinhalese Customs and Ceremonies Con- nected with Paddy Culivation in the Low Country" Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society (Colon Branch) 8 (1883): 44~93; Bell, “Superstitions Connected with the Cubivation of Alui or Hill Paddy,” Oriealist 3 (188889): 99-108; Henry W. Cave, “The Terraced Hillsdes of Ceylon," Times of Ceylon Xmas No. (1910): 52-53; Ananda K. Coomar- aswamy, “Notes on Paddy Cultivation Ceremonies in the Ratnapura District" Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society (Ceylon Branch) 18 (1905): 418-28; C. M. Austin de Silva, “Harvesting Ceremonies and Practices of the Sinhalese” Buddhist 20 (1949): 3384; R. W. levers, “Customs and Ceremonies Connected with Paddy Cultivation” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society (Ceylon Branch) 6 (1880): 46~52; C. J. R. Le Mesurier, “Ceremo- nies Connected with Paddy Cukivation in the Nuwara Eliya District” in Manual of the ‘Nuuara Eliya District (Ceylon, 1893), pp. 135-37; Le Mesurier, “Customs and Super- sttions Connected with the Cultivation of Rice inthe Southern Parts of Ceylon," Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland 17 (1885): 866~72; John P. Lewis, “Paddy Culkivation Ceremonies in the Central Provinces.” Ceylon Antiquary and Literary Register 9 (1924): 243~48. Copyright (c) 2003 ProQuest Information and Learning Comp: Copyright (c) Johns Hopkins University Press376 Bryan Pfaffenberger These ceremonies may well have played a crucial role, perhaps more crucial than the irrigation headman’s, in ensuring the equitable distribution of resources. Anthropologists have long noted that one way to control economic relations is to put matters of distribution beyond the bounds of rational discourse, especially by embedding them in ritual. The literature on the threshing-floor ceremonies is indeed replete with references to their “strange conventionalism,” which required even economically significant transactions to be con- ducted with a “superstitious scrupulousness of detail” and a special, virtually incomprehensible language. This ritual language required participants to adopt “an odd shibboleth for the ordinary colloquial talk of everyday life.” For the 19th-century civil servants who wrote detailed descriptions of these threshing-floor ceremonies, such con- ventions were engagingly quaint, testifying only to bucolic irrational- ity. But they missed the underlying rationale. Conventionalism of this sort puts the ceremonial activities beyond the scope of secular give-and-take; as Maurice Bloch puts the point for the economic and political functions of conventionalism generally, “you cannot argue with a song." The penchant for conventionalism found expression in more secular matters as well. In his early 1950s study of Pul Eliya, the Northern Province village mentioned earlier, Leach observed the arcane calculations used by the irrigation headman to compute water allocations in a Northern Province village. “Although the present generation of Pul Eliya villagers is not at all clear about the inner logic of it all,” Leach recounts, “they are keenly aware that the numerical formulae handed down from ancient times are very important. The general view seems to be: We don’t understand why things are arranged like this, but this is how they are, and we had better leave them alone.”* An important function of these calcula- tions, in short, was to put the matter of water allocation beyond argument; anyone who wanted to get involved in disputing them would be obliged, besides going against tradition, to express the argument in a symbolic form whose principles were unknown to villagers (and probably even to the irrigation headman who used them by rote). These findings are hardly surprising. Ritual regula- tion appears prominently in other traditions of community irrigation “Bell, “Sinhalese Customs” (n. 39 above), pp. 54—55. Maurice Bloch, “Symbol, Song, Dance, and the Features of Articulation,” European Journal of Sociology 15 (1974): 55~81. “Edmund Leach, Pul Eliya: A Village in Ceylon: A Study of Land Tenure and Kinship (Cambridge, 1971), pp. 164-65. Copyright (c) 2003 ProQuest Information and Learning Comp: Copyright (c) Johns Hopkins University PressTechnology and Society in Sri Lanka's Colonization Schemes 377 management. In Bali, for example, water management was a matter for temples, not political figures, and functioned very effectively to regulate the distribution of water resources where naked political power alone may well have failed." Rational argument and coercive force may work at times to control situations, but the experience of traditional society shows that it is often better to find some means by which contentious issues can be put beyond argument and made unalterable. As Robert McC. Netting notes about a small-scale irrigation system in the Swiss Alps, a system in which “no one possesses comprehensive and comprehen- sible knowledge of its total operation” may well possess a kind of “organic stability." By the 1950s, their offices having been secularized and deconventionalized, irrigation headmen were widely viewed as little more than henchmen for rich landowners. The Irrigation Ordinance's failure to provide for ritualized stability may have proved fatal to the intended reforms. The traditional customs of rice irrigation assured the equitable portioning of water rights not only by ritualizing them but also by providing a regular process by which new tank-based villages could be established when population increase threatened to subdivide the shares below subsistence level. When the size of shares became sufficiently small to pose serious threats to equity, a variety of customs were brought to bear to equalize access to water and productive land; among them were crop sharing and cultivation by rotation (tattumaru), which gave everyone an equal chance for fertile land.” When further subdivision of shares would make the estate uneconomical, all shares were frozen in a process called karamaru (relief). At this juncture, a group of kinsmen would hive off from the village and set out to create a new tank and village in the jungle; the kinsmen become sharehold- ers in the newly created asseis.* On witnessing a squabble over water, a Balinese temple scribe remarked, “So finally I went to them. I said, ‘Who created this water? Who decides if this spring is full, or dries up?" And they had to answer! I said, ‘Do you understand that if we fight over this {gift from the goddess, her spring might just dry up? Completely vanish?" ” Quoted in J Stephen Lansing, “Balinese Water ‘Temples and the Management of Irrigation,” “American Anthropologist 89 (1987): 337. “Leach (n. 42 above), p. 165. “Robert McC. Netting, “The System Nobody Knows: Village Irrigation in the Swiss Alps."in T. E. Downing and M. Gibson, eds., Irrigation’ Impact on Society (Tucson, 1974), p73, “W. A. Warnapala, Civil Service Administration in Ceylon: A Study in Bureaucratic Adapiation (Colombo, 1974), pp. 339-43. “Hetiarachchy (n. 29 above), p. 25. “Obeyesekere (n. 35 above), p. 17. Copyright (c) 2003 ProQuest Information and Learning Comp: Copyright (c) Johns Hopkins University Press378 Bryan Pfaffenberger ‘The traditional system of irrigated rice agriculture in Ceylon, in sum, was by nature an expansive one, and it depended on the availability of virgin jungle lands into which irrigated settlement could be projected. The kings of classical antiquity were probably deemed great, not because they were all-powerful or because they built irrigation systems that affected massive numbers of people, but rather because the state’s activities opened up new areas in which commu- nities could establish their own small-scale works.” The Rise of the Differentiation Process ‘The traditional customs of water rights and village expansion were deeply vulnerable to a latter-day colonial administration bent on establishing private property rights and vesting wilderness land in the colonial government. A variety of forces—population increase, the rise of private property notions, land scarcity, a taxation policy ruinous for peasants, and the onset of a rural cash economy—united to create a culturally patterned process of socioeconomic differentiation in colo- nial Ceylon, a process that well antedates the first colonization schemes. This process created a new kind of rural landlord-cum- moneylender (the mudalali) and the dependent, indebted sharecrop- ping tenant. Rooted in traditional notions of rank but crosscut by entirely new modes of economic and political relationships, these roles belong neither to Ceylon’s quasi-feudal past nor to the future envisioned by development experts; they are, rather, an odd defor- mity produced by the collision of images drawn from the new as well as the old. The rise of a new class of rural landowners as land came on the market was assisted not a little by the British colonial government's mounting hostility to all forms of precapitalist land tenure, a hostility that by the late 19th century led almost to a crusade to destroy multiple claims to land. Inimical to the legalities of clear title, such claims were believed to pose a persistent barrier to economic devel- opment in rural areas, thus diminishing the flow of revenue to the government. When faced with all the strategies Ceylonese peasants used to juggle landholdings to preserve equity in water access, the British reaction was to view such customs as powerful disincentives to investment, production, and progress." “Leslie Gunawardana, “Irrigation and Hydraulic Society in Early Medieval Sri Lanka,” Past and Present 14 (1971): 14=18. IL. J. de S. Seneviratne, “Land Tenure in the Kandyan Provinces,” Ceylon Economic Journal 9 (1937): 35-36. Copyright (c) 2003 ProQuest Information and Learning Comp: Copyright (c) Johns Hopkins University PressTechnology and Society in Sri Lanka's Colonization Schemes 379 To speed the transition to private property, the colonial government enacted the Partition Ordinance No. 10 of 1863, which allowed any shareholder in the village to sue for partition of the estate. The Par- tition Ordinance had very pernicious effects; as a district officer in Matara District put it, “the Ordinance enables a capitalist, by purchas- ing a very small share of a land, to eect the families which have held it for centuries, the capitalist becoming owner of the whole for a great deal less than its value, owing to the want of competition.”* Once partition had occurred, outside speculators could assemble plots of prime land in a way that would not have been possible under the traditional system.® From this new class of speculators emerged the landholding families, mostly Low Country Sinhalese, who led Ceylon toits independence in 1948 and have dominated its politics to this day.” This point is of great significance for the argument in the rest of this article: It was precisely this elite that was to promote the policy of Dry Zone colonization with greatest fervor. It is hardly surprising that they would embrace a settlement design that emphasized clearly demar- cated plots of land free from multiple claims; precisely this notion of land tenure had been instrumental in making their first fortunes. It would be wrong, however, to view this class as having much in common with the “stereotypical” Asian landlord, who amasses thou- sands of acres and exploits large numbers of sharecroppers. Far closer to the reality is the village schoolteacher who owns 10 acres of paddy and maintains a faithful retinue of dozens of clients,” or the coconut plantation owner who works a 50-acre tract and engages much of a local or adjacent village in patron-client relations that are far from purely exploitive. Although the landlord charges usurious interest rates, and the result for the tenant is often landlessness and servitude, the client can nevertheless turn to the landlord for help when a child falls ill, a house needs repair after a storm, or a wedding takes place.* “Cited in Michael Roberts, “Aspects of Ceylon’s Agrarian Economy in the Nineteenth, Century! University of Ceylon History of Ceylon, vol. 8 (Colombo, 1970), p. 150. “Obeyesekere (n. 35 above), pp. 165-88. “On the rise of this new class of rural capitalist landholders, see Michael Roberts, Caste Conflict and Elite Formation: The Rise of a Karava Elite in Sri Lanka, 1500-1931 (Cambridge, 1978); Patrick Peebles, “The Transformation of a Colonial Elite: The Mudaliyars of XIXth Century Ceylon” (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 1973); D. Jayanntha, “The Economic and Social Bases of Political Allegiance in Sri Lanka, 1947~ 1982" (Ph.D. diss., Cambridge University, 1982). Mick Moore, The State and Peasant Politics in Sri Lanka (Cambridge, 1985), p. 182. ‘Ronald J. Herring, “Embedded Production Relations and the Rationality of Tenant Quiescence in Tenure Reform,” Journal of Peasant Studies 8 (1981): 131—72; Richard Slater, “Tenurial Relations: A Declining Power Elite in a North-West Sri Lankan Rice Farming Community.” South Asia Research 5 (1985): 113~41 Copyright (c) 2003 ProQuest Information and Learning Comp: Copyright (c) Johns Hopkins University Press380 Bryan Pfaffenberger ‘The patron-client relationship in the Ceylonese context is, in short, by no means merely one-sided and exploitive. British Ceylon’s political evolution served to moderate this relation- ship in some cases. After the 1931 Donoughmore Constitution, which extended universal suffrage to all adult Ceylonese, village landlords often sought to transform their loyal retainers into loyal political supporters. The aim of one who seeks political support is not merely to provide some small measure of security to one's clients, as any good patron would, but rather to redistribute resources so copiously that one creates goodwill (honda hita) in the local community.* A land- holder whose orientation is “too economic,” as D. Jayanntha has shown, will quickly lose political support.” Many Ceylonese-owned tea, rubber, and coconut estates were managed so uneconomically, in fact, that operations—especially those that employed hundreds of local villagers—were funded out of capital, probably because their owners viewed such ostensibly poor management as an eminently rational investment in building a political clientele. The Ceylonese elite has been increasingly willing, in short, to “make or accept sacrifices in the material sphere” to achieve the noneconomic goal of “political dominance.”® In the absence of concerted political resistance at the local level, this new class of rural landholders-cum-politicians has been able to resist successfully any state-sponsored attempt to undermine its local power. This point was proved conclusively in the attempt by leftists in the Sri Lanka Freedom party government to reform land tenure in 1958. They sought to regulate sharecropping (or ande tenure, as it is known in Sri Lanka) so that landlords could not abuse their tenants; but the Paddy Lands Act of 1958 was emasculated by landholders before it left Parliament. When it became law, its ineffectiveness was soon apparent; elite families found a variety of ways to subvert the legislation so that their local dominance was, if anything, actually enhanced. By the time colonization schemes came to be attempted ona large scale, in sum, legal and economic changes set off during the British colonial period had created an islandwide pattern of socioeco- nomic differentiation, in which local elite families muted their eco- **Namika Raby, Kachcheri Bureaucracy in Sri Lanka: The Culture and Politics of Accessibility (Syracuse, N.¥., 1985), p. 61 Jayanntha (n. 58 above), p. 38 iN, Ramachandran, Foreign Plantation Invesiment in Colon, 1889-1958 (Colombo, 1963). “Moore (n. 54 above), p. 210. R. D. Wanigaratne, “Family Dominance in Agricultural Activites," Economic Review 2 (September 1976): 23. Copyright (c) 2003 ProQuest Information and Learning Comp: Copyright (c) Johns Hopkins University PressTechnology and Society in Sri Lanka’s Colonization Schemes 381 nomic dominance by redistributive activities aimed at creating politi- cal clienteles, and they had learned to defend their home turf against liberal reform. It was in this social environment that a major govern- ‘ment commitment to peasant colonization schemes was made. ‘The new pattern of differentiation, which was to become so evident in later projects, is visible, tellingly, in the very first irrigation development project the British attempted. In an 1857 report, J. M. Birch, the assistant government agent for the Batticaloa District in the Eastern Province, noted the social evils which he attributed to avaricious competition over increasingly scarce water in villages with dilapidated irrigation works: “moneylending at usurious rates, in- debtedness, land loss, and litigation." All this derived, Birch be- lieved, from British colonial policy, which had abolished rajakariya and therefore removed the coercive basis by which community leaders could harness labor to maintain the irrigation works. After restoring the works, Birch found that litigation virtually ceased, much to the relief of the beleaguered colonial administrators and judges. But the process of socioeconomic differentiation had not ceased; some of the resettled villagers lost their lands through transactions with money- lenders. From such experiences as these was to emerge a consistent strain of paternalism in Ceylonese land reform policies, whether framed by the British or by the Ceylonese themselves. Such policies had to be framed in such a way that they saved the peasant from his ‘own worst tendencies. This strain of paternalism was to play a major role in shaping the form that irrigation technology was to take in Sri Lanka's massive commitment to 20th-century colonization schemes. Rights to Land: The Social Construction of Colonization-Scheme Technology Contrary to the determinist thesis, then, colonization-scheme tech- nology did not create the culturally specific pattern of socioeconomic differentiation observable on the schemes; the question, rather, is why the creators of this technology failed (as did Birch) to organize the social dimension of irrigation technology so that this external process could not reproduce itself on the schemes. One reason that traditional irrigation customs were not really revived—that is, a community's rights to equitable shares in water left intact—is that doing so would have run against the entire thrust of the colonial land program. Nineteenth-century British land policy, as is demonstrated most clearly in the Partition Ordinance, was in many respects a single-minded war against multiple claims to property.” “CO 54/328 (n. 33 above). "Seneviratne (n. 50 above). Copyright (c) 2003 ProQuest Information and Learning Comp: Copyright (c) Johns Hopkins University Press382 Bryan Pfaffenberger The objective of British land policy was to cut a swath through such claims, conduct surveys, create finely focused maps, identify a single owner with clear title for every piece of land, and thereby remove the constraints that were perceived to exist on capital investment in agriculture. A cornerstone of this policy was the Crown Lands (Encroachment) Ordinance of 1840 (and its subsequent amend- ments), which relegated all land not currently “owned” (by proof of clear title or continuous use) to the Grown. Of a total area of almost exactly 16 million acres, some 6 million—more than a third of Sri Lanka’s surface—has at one time or another been Crown land, under the terms of the ordinance.” ‘The 1840 Crown Lands legislation may well have been expressly intended to make the highlands available to European capitalists at low cost; the lands acquired by fiat in 1840 were sold for as little as five shillings per acre. Beginning in the 1830s, British coffee planters began to amass substantial amounts of land in the highlands; by 1869, the peak year for coffee exports, some 300,000 acres had been given over to European-owned plantations. To go against this policy would be tantamount to opposing the dominant direction of British colonial interests in Ceylon, so that—arguably—no British civil servant in his right mind would have proposed a land policy at odds with it. tis not surprising, then, that the first comprehensive design for an irrigation-based settlement scheme—a design that emerged from the work of a British civil servant, C. V. Brayne—blended paternalism with carefully defined, clearly titled plots of land. The resulting scheme could not fail to have appeal to those for whom colonization-scheme technology had come to mean “land for the peasant"—as opposed to “equitable water access to rice cultivators." And as will be seen, the groups were many who came to view the technology that way. Brayne worked diligently in the 1920s to create what he called the “peasant proprietor” system of irrigation technology. The scheme “Moore (n. 54 above), p. 31 “Ics im this sense that colonization-scheme technology is socially constructed. There is no“one best way" to create an artifact. Rather, the groups participating in an artifact’s design and deployment define the problems to be solved in design according to the ‘meaning that the artifact has for them. These groups and meanings vary, but sometimes controversy dies and an artifact stabilizes around a standard design configuration. Precisely this process can be observed in the social construction of irrigation technology in Ceylon, where stabilization came quickly because, from the perspective of virtually all the groups participating in the technology's design and deployment, irrigation works came to mean “land for the peasant,” as the following discussion makes clear. "CO 54/891/3, enclosure “Report on the Working of the Peasant Proprietor System.” in dispatch of August 25, 1928. Copyright (c) 2003 ProQuest Information and Learning Comp: Copyright (c) Johns Hopkins University PressTechnology and Society in Sri Lanka's Colonization Schemes 383 was based on an unscientific (but politically viable) idea of an “economic holding,” one that would provide an adequate livelihood for a family of average size without requiring them to hire outside labor. To prevent the loss of the plot to village moneylenders and also to discourage its fragmentation, it was not sold to the peasant, but, rather leased as a block in perpetuity. State officers supervised the scheme to ensure that the works were kept in good order and the land used for productive purposes. Brayne’s work resulted in a technical design that blends tanks and canals with rigidly demarcated land plots. Brayne’s motives in framing this design were those of a public servant, ever mindful of revenue issues, who nevertheless felt sym- pathy for the peasants’ plight and took an active interest in agricul- ture. First and foremost, he was searching for a formula that, while preserving clear titles and fixed boundaries for all land plots, would nevertheless keep paddy land out of the hands of speculators and moneylenders. But there was a more important harvest to be reaped from Brayne’s scheme than the mere improvement of the peasant'’s life. Brayne’s peasant-proprietor scheme was to find additional sup- port from a host of political figures, beginning with Hugh Clifford, then governor of British Ceylon, who saw it as a useful reply to mounting criticism of government policy. Under increasing attack in the court of Ceylonese public opinion for failing to protect the peasantry, and increasingly criticized by the nationalist elite for favoring plantation over peasant agriculture, the British colonial government wholeheartedly embraced the new scheme as a solution to its growing public relations problem. This problem was exacerbated by serious economic problems caused by the roller-coaster rise and fall of tea, rubber, and coconut products prices in the world market, which ensured that a period of prosperity would almost certainly be followed by a time of hardship, which would naturally hit peasants the hardest. There was stinging criticism, too, of the way in which the colonial government was allocating the massive expanses of Crown land; the mechanism by which such lands were sold all but placed it beyond the reach of peasants, and most of the land was going to Geylonese and other capitalists. The idea that funding irrigation works could counter nationalist pressure was by no means new. In 1855, Governor Ward justified the restoration of several irrigation projects to the Colonial Office by stressing their role in “balancing” the government’s commitment to "Vijaya Samaraweera, “Land Policy and Peasant Colonization, 1914-1948," in University of Ceylon History of Ceylon, vol. 3 (Colombo, 1970), p. 447. Copyright (c) 2003 ProQuest Information and Learning Company Copyright (c) Johns Hopkins University Press384 Bryan Pfaffenberger plantation agriculture.” With mounting pressure from Ceylonese nationalist organizations, Clifford likewise saw investment in irri- gation land for “natives” as a valuable tool for disarming adverse sentiment. In a dispatch to the Colonial Office, Clifford argued that investments in colonization schemes should help to clear up animosities against the planting community, “both European and Ceylonese;” by showing that there is “ample land of first class quality still available in the most fertile areas of the island . . . for the occupation of self-respecting and self-supporting peasant cultivators." Brayne’s design, as reflected in later colonization schemes (see fig. 3), has obvious merits for those who would like to be seen distributing land in nice, countable units. The pigeonhole configura- tion of precisely surveyed plots, for instance, admits easily of quanti- fication, so it is easy to count (and publicize) the number of families settled, the number of plots allocated, and the number of acres given over for the preservation of the peasantry. Traditional modes of irrigation organization, although they are much better suited to preventing socioeconomic differentiation, would have admitted only grudgingly of such counts, given the potential that any given piece of land was ipso facto subject to multiple claims, and the total acreage of the wewa (tank and paddy land) would have been adjusted upward or downward depending on ecological conditions. Later, the technology's clear symbolism of equity in land distribu- tion would play a key role in projecting “undertones of an agrarian populism which idealized the peasantry as an undifferentiated category"’—and which, as will be seen, was pregnant with meaning for both the English and the Ceylonese nationalist elite (albeit for different reasons). For the waning British colonial presence, however, the key point is that Brayne blended a genuine (if paternalistic) concern for the peasant with a design that did not upset colonial notions of land tenure and clear title but, on the contrary, could only appeal to the colonial mentality that favored mechanistic structures and precise role definitions.” Such a mentality would hardly have CO 54/317, July 11, 1855, “CO 54/886/11, enclosure “Some Reflections on the Ceylon Land Question;” in dispatch of Clifford to L. C. M.S. Avery, July 13, 1927, N, Shanmugaratnam, “Some Aspects of the Evolution and Implementation of the Policy of Peasant Resettlement in the Dry Zone of Sri Lanka,” in Charles Abeysekera, €ed., Capital and Peasant Production: Studies in the Continuity and Discontinuity of Agrarian ‘Structures in Sri Lanka (Colombo, 1985), p. 71 "Tony Barnett, The Gezira Scheme: An Illusion of Development (London, 1977), p. 171 Copyright (c) 2003 ProQuest Information and Learning Comp: Copyright (c) Johns Hopkins University PressTechnology and Society in Sri Lanka’s Colonization Schemes 385 Fic. 8—Land allocation in a Mahaweli settlement (1979) favored a proposal, it might be added, to allocate key agricultural i stems of ss stocked and self- Copyright (c) 2003 ProQuest Information and Learning Company Copyright (c) Johns Hopkins University Press386 Bryan Pfaffenberger respecting” peasant proprietors, as Clifford put it),” dwelling happily on clearly defined and protected plots of land, had obvious value in the propaganda contest with Ceylonese nationalists, but it had the additional virtue of resonating nicely with English notions about English agricultural history, which have been described tellingly by Martin Wiener.” Observing a “green and pleasant land” becoming a nation of “dark, Satanic mills,” a generation of anti-industrial English squirearchs, such as G. K. Chesterton and his friend Hilaire Belloc, bemoaned the loss of the rural way of life, and—in the opening decade of the 20th century—called for peasant proprietorship in England as a way of restoring the true English nation. Nostalgia for the virtues of rural life was not seen as only a moral imperative; “contact with Mother Earth,” argued Lord Bledisoe some years later, “is the most powerful antidote for Bolshevism.” Industrialism and urbanization may have had their defenders in Britain, but it was from ranks of families holding the opinions of Chesterton, Belloc, and Bledisoe that most colonial administrators were drawn, Indeed, the appeal of service in the imperial expansion, Wiener suggests, “was that of escape from the pressure of unwelcome social change at home, and the recreation of ‘traditional’ English life overseas.” The benefits were not merely for the British in their enclaves: a British colonial officer lamented deeply in 1913 that the natives of Fiji would someday be made into replicas of the inhabitants of Denver and Birmingham and Stuttgart, and he spoke for many English civil servants who saw the colonies—not altogether for reasons of imperial exploitation—as a place where the virtuous country life might be preserved. In this campaign the English colonial presence in Ceylon was singularly successful; Ceylon is virtually unique among ‘Third World nations for having experienced very little alteration in its rural-urban balance over the past century, and the country has proved singularly resistant to industrialization. In British Ceylon, the effects of the Crown Land (Encroachment) Act of 1840, which arrogated all unused and communal lands to the Crown, could have been compared only by English civil servants of this turn of mind with the English parliamentary enclosure acts, which from the second quarter of the 18th century to the first quarter of the 19th century had put 6 million acres of English communal lands into the hands of politically dominant landowners. In the growing tradition of anti-industrial literature and sentiment, much ‘CO 54/86/11 (n. 68 above). "Wiener (n. 28 above), esp. pp. 55~ quotations were drawn , 84-85, and 107, from which the following Copyright (c) 2003 ProQuest Information and Learning Comp: Copyright (c) Johns Hopkins University PressTechnology and Society in Sri Lanka's Colonization Schemes 387 favored at Oxbridge, the enclosure movement emerged early as a major evil, a travesty that ruined the lives of “independent and honorable men, living in a working rural democracy, who were coldly and ‘legally’ destroyed by the new enclosing order.”” The outcome of enclosure, it was felt, was landlessness, and eventually migration to the cities, where rowdy urban masses posed a constant threat to political order and the tranquil life. For Ceylon, the only cure was the distribution of land, for—as the government agent of the Western Province wrote in 1900—“when every villager has a piece of land—small though it may be—of his own, he is given a stake in the interests of law and order, and feels that he is at least removed from the fear of urgent want.” In this cultural context, a colonial government program that distributed land to the peasantry would have as much meaning, and appeal, to English and Colonial Office officials as it would to the Ceylonese critics of the former government. policy. There can be no doubt that the English voices raised in defense of the suffering Ceylonese peasant were sincere ones.” Yet the sincerity was molded by a view of the world that saw the possession of inalienable land, not the equitable distribution of water, as the crucial variable in peasant welfare. Brayne’s and Clifford’s paternalistic calls for peasant proprietor- ship were taken up by the Land Commission, a government- appointed body that included several prominent members of the Ceylonese nationalist elite (including the man who would become Ceylon’s first prime minister, D. $. Senanayake).” The commission advocated the distribution of Crown lands to peasants in colonization schemes designed in accordance with Brayne’s work, with the addi- tional stipulation that—as Brayne and Clifford had both recommended—the subdivision of plots on the settler’s death be prohibited by requiring each settler to name a single successor. The Ceylonese members of the commission adopted Brayne’s plan even in spirit, including its paternalism: agricultural policy, Senanayake noted, should be devised to “secure the welfare of [the peasant] classes ‘even against themselves."” And, significantly, the commission made the case successfully that the Crown lands are held in trust by the Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (Harmondsworth, 1985), p. 100. Administration Report of the Government Agent, Wester Province, quoted in Samarawe~ era (n. 66 above), p. 448. *See,e.g., Leonard Woolf, The Village in the Jungle (London, 1913); and C. V. Brayne, “The Problem of Peasant Agriculture in Ceylon,” Ceylon Economic Journal 6 (December 1934): 34-46, ™ Final Report of the Land Commission of 1927, Sessional Paper No. 18 (Colombo, 1929). "Agriculture and Patriotism (Colombo, 1985), p. 18. Copyright (c) 2003 ProQuest Information and Learning Comp: Copyright (c) Johns Hopkins University Press388 Bryan Pfaffenberger government for the benefit of the people of the island, including generations not yet born.” Despite its bias toward smallholder interests, it should be noted that the commission's report did not in any sense stem from smallholder political demands (beyond a vague sense of discomfort about the outcomes of landlessness and overcrowding in the overpopulated Wet Zone). Rather, the commission's report reflected the Ceylonese na- tionalist elite’s desire to paint a portrait of itself as the “self-appointed champions” of smallholder interests—for reasons that Vijaya Sa- maraweera has recently clarified.” Samaraweera argues that the Ceylonese nationalist elite, as it was represented on the Land Com- mission, would have had an excellent reason for calling for the funding of irrigation works and the distribution of lands to the peasants—the same reason, in fact, that the colonial government had: to deflect animosity away from plantation owners, among whom were increasing numbers of wealthy Ceylonese (such as Senanayake him- self) and from the government's failure (whether under the British or under the Geylonese nationalist elite) to sponsor meaningful land reform legislation. By portraying themselves as the true champions of the peasant vis-a-vis the plantation sector, however, the nationalist clite managed to obfuscate its own strong and growing presence in the plantation sector and to lay a convincing claim for political support. To make the claim as persuasive as possible, this elite created and elaborated a remarkably powerful myth about the vicissitudes of the rural peasantry, a myth that was to find expression in several works, including Senanayake’s own Agriculture and Patriotism, and the 1951 Report of the Kandyan Peasantry Commission,*' which presents the most influential account. Central to this myth was a powerful, if factually questionable, depiction of the plantation sector's deleterious effect.” A. T. Mahinda Silva, “The Evolution of Land Policies in Sri Lanka—an Overview," ‘Marga 7 (1983): 44~52; Farmer (n. 1 above), pp. 116~21 ® Moore (n. 54 above), p. 35. “Vijaya Samaraweera, “Land, Labour, Capital, and Sectional Interests in the National Politics of Sri Lanka,” Modern Asian Studies 15 (1981): 127-62. Echoing Samaraweera’s analysis is David Dunham, “Politics and Land Settlement Schemes: ‘The Case of Sri Lanka," Development and Change 13 (1982): 43-61 "Sessional Paper No. 18 of 1951 (Colombo, 1951). In saying that the nationalist elite ‘created and elaborated this myth, I do not mean to suggest that they did so in a rational, cold calculation of its potential politcal utility. On the contrary, it stems in the first instance from this elite’s attempt at selfjustification: here, afterall, were Geylonese who were stepping into the shoes of departing British tea planters, and such a move could not be made without atleast some effort being expended to excuse or justify this action, "On the myth of the plantation’s effect, see Michael Roberts, "The Impact of the ‘Waste Lands Legislation and the Growth of Plantations on the Techniques of Paddy Cultivation in British Ceylon: A Critique,” Mederu Ceylon Studies 1 (1970): 157-98, Copyright (c) 2003 ProQuest Information and Learning Comp: Copyright (c) Johns Hopkins University PressTechnology and Society in Sri Lanka’s Colonization Schemes 389 Blame is placed particularly on the Crown Lands (Encroachment) Ordinance of 1840 and the subsequent growth of plantations that circumscribed traditional (purana) villages, with disastrous conse- quences for peasants, including the fragmentation of land plots into ludicrously noneconomic slivers, pauperization and landlessness, eco- logical catastrophe, and technological retardation. Owing to the severe fragmentation of paddy acreage caused by hemming the villages in, and abetted by the loss of fertilizer and draft power as highland land (chena) formerly used for grazing disappeared, rural incomes are seen to have declined drastically, and more than 60 percent of rural families were (in this view) forced against their will to depend on sources of income outside agriculture." At the same time, village moneylenders found easy pickings among peasants whose plots had shrunk past the margin of subsistence, leading to the spread of sharecropping (which is notorious for low productivity). The result, in this view of the plantation’s effect, was the destruction of the traditional peasant economy and the substitution, in its place, of a grotesque and unproductive parody of rural capitalism. Mick Moore summarizes the myth in the following terms: a belief in the harmony, unity and self-sufficiency of the pre- colonial village, i.e., a reiteration of the myth, widespread in South Asia in ‘particular, of a golden village-based past; the identification of Buddhism as the central socio-cultural theme of this village community; the conviction that autonomous and quasi-democratic village self-government was replaced by a bu- reaucratic administrative structure as part of the general process of decay associated with colonialism and plantation development; the identification of rice cultivation as the material focus of village life; a concern with the moral deterioration of the peasantry; the advocacy of remedial state action in the areas of marriage, divorce, and child labour; and a stress on the importance of protecting the peasantry from the “grave danger” of persons of "As a measure of the severity of land fragmentation in some Ceylonese villages, consider that 64.3 percent of all landholdings in the island at independence were less than one acre; indeed, plots as small as a one-thousandth of an acre have been reported. See L. Arulpragasm, “A Consideration of the Problems Arising from the Size and Subdivision of Paddy Holdings in Ceylon and the Principles and Provisions of the Paddy Lands Act Pertaining to Them,” Ceylon Journal of Historical and Social Studies 4 (1961): 60. MN. K. Sarkar and S. J. Tambiah, The Disintgrating Village (Colombo, 1957), pp. 18-20. "E.g., in the Dry Zone village called Terutenne, 3.2 percent of the adult population, held 40.8 percent of all paddy acreage. Nur Yalman, Under the Bo Tree: Caste, Kinship, ‘and Marriage in the Highlands of Ceylon (Berkeley, 1968), p. 42. Copyright (c) 2003 ProQuest Information and Learning Comp: Copyright (c) Johns Hopkins University Press390 Bryan Pfaffenberger non-peasant character, for they encouraged “gambling, drink, and immorality.’ One must here reiterate Moore’s caution that, in calling such thinking a myth, one is not necessarily arguing that all the myth’s claims are false. What is characteristic of a myth is that its claims, which may well have some foundation in fact, are “accepted and transmitted without regard for, or enquiry into, [their] veracity."” This myth is a potent package of truths, near-truths, and some false but very compelling visions of English as well as Ceylonese history. In its portrait of a peasantry devastated by greed and social change, it obviously draws on English ideas about country virtues and parlia- mentary enclosures, but it adds an element the English could not and would not include: the stress on Buddhism, which the nationalist elite proposed to champion, and which had already undergone a signifi- cant nationalist revival in the face of Christian proselytization.® In this way, the nationalist elite succeeded in developing a highly effective claim for Sinhalese Buddhist political support, in view of the fact that its only real competitor, the Ceylon Civil Service and, more broadly, the remnants of the colonial order, could hardly espouse state protection for one of Ceylon’s four world religions." As Samaraweera points out, however, the nationalist elite went even further in its campaign to best its adversaries: prominent in this mythic edifice was a thinly veiled (and highly effective) appeal to Sinhalese ethnic chauvinism. In portraying Dry Zone colonization as a way of revitalizing the Sinhalese civilizations of antiquity, and in insisting that the Crown lands of the wilderness be distributed to what D.S. Senanayake called “the island’s first inhabitants” (i.e., the Sinhalese), the nationalist elite spoke clearly to fears generated by the growing population of Indian Tamils in the central highlands (and the increasing presence of indigenous Ceylon Tamils, who tradition- ally resided in the north and east, in Ceylon’s public life). The fear that Tamils might overwhelm the Dry Zone was no mere paranoid fantasy: In the 19th century, colonial officials speculated that Ceylon's labor problems could be solved by importing millions of Tamils from southern India to live in Dry Zone villages, from which the plantations could draw excess labor. In stressing both the revival of Buddhism "Moore (n. 54 above), p. 68 "Ibid., p. 243. “On the Buddhist revival, see Kitsiti Malalgoda, Buddhism in Sinhalese Society 1750-1900 (Berkeley, 1976), ‘"Samaraweera (n. 80 above), pp. 135 ff Copyright (c) 2003 ProQuest Information and Learning Comp: Copyright (c) Johns Hopkins University PressTechnology and Society in Sri Lanka’s Colonization Schemes 391 and the policy of Dry Zone colonization, the nationalist elite champi- oned an approach whose elements the Sinhalese Buddhist electorate could not fail to connect: ancient Buddhist texts identify the entire island as a sacred land destined to preserve Buddhism. To cement the connection, Senanayake went so far as to claim descent from the ancient Buddhist kings of the Dry Zone civilizations.” ‘As the colonization program accelerated in the 20th century, the ethnic dimension of the program became increasingly apparent. With- out specifically excluding Ceylon Tamils from the colonization schemes, the nationalist elite nevertheless called, prior to Ceylon’s 1948. independence, for the exclusion of Indian Tamils from disbursements of Crown land of all forms." Since independence, the bias toward Sinhalese and Buddhist settlers has become increasingly plain; the opening of new colonization schemes, for instance, is celebrated with specifically Buddhist ceremonies, as the late Serena Tennekoon so compellingly documented.” Although the official government policy is to allot land in the schemes to Sinhalese and Tamil peasants in proportions paralleling the ethnic composition of the country, this policy creates large Sinhalese constituencies in the Northern and East- ern Province areas claimed by Tamils as their traditional homelands. Colonization has therefore become a major issue in the deteriorating relations between the Sinhalese and Tamil communities in Sri Lanka: ‘Tamils charge that the Sinhalese-dominated government has used the colonization program as a ploy to settle Sinhalese peasants in electoral districts that were previously dominated by Tamils, thus emasculating ‘Tamils politically by making them (as one Sinhalese politician actually put it) a minority in their own provinces.* Between 1946 and 1971, for instance, the Sinhalese proportion of the population in five Dry Zone provinces increased from 33 to 51 percent, thanks largely to government-sponsored settlement of Sinhalese colonists.* Given the direct appeal of the colonization programs to Sinhalese ethnic chau- vinism, Sinhalese political leaders would see the schemes’ poor economic and social performance as a minor matter indeed; what mattered is distributing countable amounts of land to equally countable Janice Jiggins, Caste and Family inthe Poi ofthe Sinkalae, 19471976 (Cambridge, 1979), p. II “'Samaraweera (a. 80 above), p. 150. ‘'Rituals of Development: The Accelerated Mahavali Development Program of Sri Lanka," American Edinologist 15 (1988): 294~310. “For an essay on colonization from the Tamil point of view, see C. Manogaran, Ethnic Confit and Reconciliation in Sri Lanka (Honoluls, 1988), pp. 78~114. Census of Ceylon, 1948, vol. 1, pt. 2, table 28; Census of Ceylon, 1971, General Report, pp. 38, 84 Copyright (c) 2003 ProQuest Information and Learning Comp: Copyright (c) Johns Hopkins University Press392 Bryan Pfaffenberger numbers of Sinhalese peasant settlers, and what is more, doing so in traditionally Tamil districts. After the 1931 Donoughmore Constitu- tion, which established universal adult suffrage (the first such devel- opment in Asia), this eminently calculatable facet of Brayne’s land distribution design, as it played into the hands of the nationalist elite, became even more valuable as Ceylonese politicians looked for support in the rural Sinhalese masses. Postindependence political trends, which have seen a thorough politicization of the public service, have only furthered the political functions of land distribution, since political parties have come to use colonization-scheme land allocations (particularly at the top end of the scheme) and jobs in the irrigation bureaucracy as a way of rewarding the party faithful. Commenting on such uses, Karunati- lake speaks of a “consistent desire” to set up administrative structures that sustain and institutionalize party dominance by creating retinues of party supporters." The result is a highly politicized, top-down administrative structure that often betrays serious shortcomings as political goals take precedence over economic or social ones.” ‘Throughout such structures (and in the Sri Lankan economy gener- ally), one finds evidence of what Shanmugaratnam aptly terms a “precedence of politics over economics.”* The way in which land is allocated in the schemes may be counterproductive, and the irrigation bureaucracy may be inefficient and politicized, but neither can be lightly discarded; there are few political resources in Sri Lanka that can equal the vote-getting potential of handing out a clear title to a plot of land, or a job in the much-valued civil service. The concept of land tenure and paternalism implicit in Brayne’s design for the colonization schemes continues, in short, to serve new political purposes. ‘The one remaining group relevant to the construction and deploy- ment of irrigation technology, the civil engineers who worked on these schemes, would have also had strong incentives to focus on the Dunham (n, 80 above), p. 49. “H. N. S. Karunatilake, “An Evaluation of the Development Programmes under Divisional Development Councils in Sri Lanka,” Sri Lanka Journal of the Social Sciences 1 (1978): 1-38. Murray Straus, “Cultural Factors in the Functioning of Agricultural Extension in Ceylon,” Rural Sociology 18 (1953): 249-56; R. LaPorte, “Administrative, Political, and Social Constraints on Economic Development in Ceylon,” International Review of Administrative Sciences 36 (1970): 158~74; S. Goonatilake, “Environmental Influences on an Industrial Organization in Ceylon,” Modern Ceylon Studies 8 (1972): 36~59. ‘“Shanmugaratnam (n. 69 above), p. 67. Copyright (c) 2003 ProQuest Information and Learning Comp: Copyright (c) Johns Hopkins University PressTechnology and Society in Sri Lanka's Colonization Schemes 393 distribution of land rather than of water. Like mechanical engineers who exclude friction from their computations, civil engineers evade the complexities of water, thus avoiding “the maddening nature of water itself, with its tendency to flow, seep, evaporate, condense, and transpire, and the problems it presents in measurement—problems which tie down natural and physical scientists to research-intensive tasks, denying them time, even if they had the inclination, to branch out and examine wider aspects such as the people who manage the water and how they behave.”” Using highly abstract computations, the engineering design team ensures that—if all the farmers manage water correctly—all the plots on the settlement will be adequately watered. But of course the farmers do not manage the water properly; there are few incentives to do so. In reply, the engineers place the blame for the schemes’ economic and social failures squarely on the farmers." In their view, water management is a “people problem,” not a matter for engineers or technology; to get involved in water management and people problems would be to set sail in an unfathomable ocean in which no known formula applies, and in which there would be, in any case, few professional rewards or incentives for a competent professional engineer to pursue." And, by the 1980s, there was little question anyway of experimenting with new forms of social organization of irrigation; a series of experiments with communal tenures and self-governance in the 1970s showed clearly that irrigation bureaucracy was far too entrenched, and far too valuable as a fund of political rewards, to be expected to relinquish its authoritarian control over irrigation communities, and the experi ments failed.’ By the late 1960s, it was becoming quite clear that the technical and organizational design of the schemes was producing a host of unwanted social outcomes, which amounted—ironically and frustratingly—to a list of the very evils that the schemes were designed (in part) to prevent. In response to mounting criticism, the Mahaweli project’s designers sought better to “understand the interdependencies between social and technical phenomena in designing and building an irrigated Robert Chambers, “Men and Water: The Organization and Operation of Irriga- tion," in B. H. Farmer, ed., Green Revolution? Technology and Change in the Rice Growing Areas of Tamil Nadu and Sri Lanka (Boulder, Colo., 1977), p. 341 ‘See Maheshwaran (n. 11 above). "M. P. Moore, “The Sociology of Irrigation Management in Sri Lanka,” Water Supply ‘and Management 5 (1981): 126-27. “A. Ellman and D. Ranaweera, New Setlement Schemes in Sri Lanka (Colombo, 1975) Copyright (c) 2003 ProQuest Information and Learning Compan Copyright (c) Johns Hopkins University Press394 Bryan Pfaffenberger settlement scheme.”"® The understanding of social phenomena that was employed, however, seems to have been predicated on the notion that farmers are not likely to manage the water effectively in large communities, so the solution chosen is a classic “technical fix": water is to be delivered via centrally controlled turnout units to small groups of only twelve to fifteen households, which are encouraged to participate in farmers’ organizations to handle water distribution internally. Mounting evidence indicates that this technical fix has not eradi- cated the problem of socioeconomic differentiation on the new schemes; in fact, precisely the same pattern is appearing, replete with increased incidences of sharecropping, land concentration in the hands of moneylenders, pauperization as colonists become increas- ingly indebted and lose their land, and the growth of a class of rich peasants-cum-mudalalis, who covertly amass large “estates” within the irrigated acreage." One study suggests that the process of socioeco- nomic differentiation has actually accelerated in the Mahaweli settle- ments compared to their predecessors." The reappearance of the differentiation process in the new Ma- haweli settlements has been attributed to many causes, such as delays in the delivery of water, cutbacks in government funding of agricul- tural inputs, and technical problems caused by shoddy workmanship. From the perspective of this analysis, however, chief among them is the failure of the technical fix to repair the problem. Since the irrigation technology was not actually causing the pattern of socio- economic differentiation but only permitting an existing pattern to reproduce itself on the schemes, the technical fix (field channels and turnout units) could accomplish nothing; although the new system narrows the scope of water delivery, it still uses fixed plots of paddy land. It therefore does nothing to prevent the exogenous pattern of differentiation from having its heyday in the new schemes as well as the old. "ML. Wickremasinghe, C. M. Wijayaratne, and S. Ganewatte, “The Institutional Framework of Irrigation and Cropping: Major Colonization Schemes in Sri Lanka,” in Farrington, Abeyratne, " in. Abeysekera (0, 69 above), p. 114; 5.5. A. L. Siriwardene, Emerging Income Inequalities and Forms of Hidden Tenancy in the Mahaweli H Area (Colombo, 1981); Thayer Scudder and Kapila P. Wimaladharma, The Accelerated Mahaweli Pro- ‘gramme (AMP) and Dry Zone Development. Report No.5 (Pasadena, Calif, 1985) "P Wickramasekara, “The Role of Land Setlement Programmes in Raising the Productivity of the Poor: A Sri Lankan Case Study” in Swapna Mukhopadhyay, ed., Case Studies on Poverty Programmes in Asia (Kuala Lumpur, 1985), p- 23. Copyright (c) 2003 ProQuest Information and Learning Comp: Copyright (c) Johns Hopkins University PressTechnology and Society in Sri Lanka’s Colonization Schemes 395 Conclusions Sri Lanka’s experience with gravity-flow irrigation technology seems, on the surface, to provide yet another example of the dangers of transferring Western technology in pursuit of social equity in Third World countries: Once the technology is put into place, its internal logic, coupled with the lack of interest of Western-trained engineers in the social and cultural dimensions of the system’s use and maintenance, operates insidiously to reproduce the structure of capitalist class relations. As this article has demonstrated, however, this appearance is itself an artifact, illusory and deceptive in the extreme; it reverses the causal arrows and strips the schemes of their true historical context. Sri Lanka's own experience with traditional irrigation systems shows, remarkably enough, that equity is possible in gravity-flow systems, provided that rights are allocated to water instead of land. But the social design of colonization-scheme irrigation technology arose in a historical context (namely, the British war against multiple claims on land) that obviated the very sensible and ecologically adaptive water allocations that were such a prominent feature of the traditional system. And for a variety of reasons, Sri Lanka’s nationalist lite found this design, flawed though it was, of immense political value, and so they adopted and maintained it even after its flaws became obvious. Sri Lanka’s modern irrigation technology, then, does not cause socioeconomic differentiation. Rather, it does little or nothing to stop an existing differentiation process, which intrudes from the schemes’ environment and subverts their social and economic objectives. This point is amply demonstrated by the newer Mahaweli schemes, in which socioeconomic differentiation is prominent even though water is turned out to small farmer groups via expensive distributory channels. In short, the water distribution technology is not really the problem. The problem is that equity cannot be assured in the absence of a social, cultural, and legal framework that insists on the equitable distribution of water, coupled with an ecologically sensitive adjust- ment of landholdings as water availability fluctuates. But such a design would not have had the political value of Brayne’s design, which—above all—made it possible to distribute countable plots to countable voters. The evidence from Sri Lanka shows why engineering, if it is to serve its purpose in improving human welfare, must embrace within its professional responsibility a concern for the social, cultural, and legal context of the technical systems engineers create. As John Law Copyright (c) 2003 ProQuest Information and Learning Comp: Copyright (c) Johns Hopkins University Press396 Bryan Pfaffenberger has argued, successful engineers achieve their objectives precisely because they do not shrink from the need to shape the contexts in which their systems and artifacts will operate." To ignore or over- simplify the social and cultural dimensions of technology is to increase the risk of unpredicted consequences and failure. To be sure, it is comforting in the face of uncertainty to reduce complexity by adopting a simple idea of human social relations as heuristic and then getting down to the “real” business (designing the hardware). But the dangers of such assumptions are all too clear. In an important paper on the Gezira irrigation scheme in Sudan, Barnett underscores the naiveté of technical transfers that assume such heuristically simple notions of social relations, only to graft them on the complex (and poorly understood) relations that already exist. The result, Barnett suggests, is that the relations that were to have been a “black box,” simple and easily ignored, become a “Pandora's box,” producing unpredictable outcomes that can overturn the benefits of even the most well-intentioned project.” And in the context of technology transfer, a refusal to think seriously about the social and cultural design of a technical system may play into the hands of political elites, who may insist (as did Sri Lanka’s nationalist elite) on a deeply flawed design that suits their political interests. Admittedly, by no means is it easy to conceptualize the social dimension of technological systems adequately—indeed, this lengthy article stands as evidence of the complexity of the historical, social, and cultural processes in which technical innovations are situated. As MacKenzie and Wajcman argue, any attempt to predict the influence of a given technology on a society requires nothing less than a “good theory of how that society works,” requiring (at the minimum) “an understanding of the overall dynamics of a society.” It is therefore “one of the most difficult, rather than one of the easiest, questions to answer.” Heinz R. Pagels recently argued that the greatest challenge now facing Western science is to account for (and predict) the behavior of complex, dynamic systems, of which human societies are but one example." Such systems are far more common in nature than has been admitted by Newtonian science, with its program of discov- ering simple, natural laws. A significant investment in educational and "John Law, “On the Social Explanation of Technical Change: The Case of the Portuguese Maritime Expansion,” Technology and Culture 28 (1987); 227-52 "Tony Barnett, “The Gezira Scheme: Black Box or Pandora's Box,” University of East Anglia School of Development Studies, Discussion Paper 45 (April 1983). ‘MacKenzie and Wajeman (n. 10 above), pp. 6-7. Heinz R. Pagels, The Dreams of Reason: The Computer and the Rise of the Sciences of Complesty (New York, 1988), p. 53 Copyright (c) 2003 ProQuest Information and Learning Compan Copyright (c) Johns Hopkins University PressTechnology and Society in Sri Lanka's Colonization Schemes 397 research resources will be necessary to develop the needed analytical tools. Yet by no means is that sufficient reason to shrink from the task. In the decades to come, we may find that our quest to understand the social dimensions of new technologies is just as important, and just as deserving of research commitment, as our quest for new means of transforming nature for human use. And in the end, our survival as a species may depend not only on the technologies we create but also on whether we can comprehend what we are making of ourselves when we construct them. Copyright (c) 2003 ProQuest Information and Learning Compan Copyright (c) Johns Hopkins University Press