Nobodies to Somebodies: The Rise of the Colonial Bourgeoisie in Sri Lanka (review)

This is an important book in the context of Sri Lankan historiography. While previous historical research has acknowledged the importance of economic and social forces, the analysis of Sri Lankan history under British colonial rule has been characterized by inordinate attention to political history. The main themes of history writing on this era has been the conquest of the island by the British, the development of the apparatus of colonial control, the emergence of a nationalist movement and the process of constitutional reform culminating in independence in 1948. Attention paid to economic forces has been confined largely to the emergence of a plantation economy and its consequences, while social history has tended to focus on the rise of caste and ethnic rivalries and the activities of Christian missionaries and the resistance they evoked among Buddhists, Hindus and Muslims, particularly in the area of education.

Thirty years ago, Kumari Jayawardena provided a very different perspective in The Rise of the Labor Movement in Ceylon (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1972). A few years later, Michael Roberts published Caste Conflict and Elite Formation: The Rise of a Karava Elite in Sri Lanka, 1500–1931(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979). Other work done in the 1970s remained less well known. For example, Patrick Peebles completed a thesis on the Sinhala elite of the southwest of the country in 1973, but unfortunately, this work remained unpublished for twenty years (see, Social Change in Nineteenth Century Ceylon[New Delhi: Navrang, 1995]). Newton Gunasinghe’s work on Kandyan peasants eventually culminated in the publication of Changing Socio-Economic Relations in the Kandyan Countryside (Colombo: Social Scientists Association, 1990). Despite these important works, there have been few scholarly attempts to explore the social and class basis the nineteenth and twentieth century history of Sri Lanka until the last decade.

It is in this context that Kumari Jayawardena’s book is of significance. Jayawardena contends that “class” rather than caste provides the key to the interpretation of the political, social and economic history of this period. She brings in the Marxist category of the bourgeoisie as a key element in her analysis. According to her interpretation the rise of the bourgeoisie in Sri Lanka comes after the beginnings of colonial rule but it predates the rise of coffee plantations in the mid nineteenth century. The fledgling bourgeoisie arose from the countryside and benefited from profits from land ownership, cinnamon cultivation, transport contracts, farming of rights to collect tolls and exclusive rights to sell liquor in certain areas. With the opening up of state land for plantation agriculture, the bourgeoisie continued to flourish and they profited from the new coffee (and later tea, rubber and coconut plantations). They also continued to branch out into other activities including land acquisition, graphite mining and state employment.

Jayawardena points out that there were fissures within the bourgeoisie, between the “nobodies” or new rich and the “somebodies” or the older established families. Jayawardena correctly points out that most of these “somebodies” had attained that status during previous periods of colonial rule under the Portuguese and the Dutch. More significantly, she clearly disagrees with Michael Roberts who interprets the divisions within the bourgeoisie as caste conflicts. While she acknowledges that there was a disproportionate number of the bourgeoisie (especially “nobodies”) from the karava caste, she points out that many members of the dominant goyigama caste played key entrepreneurial roles and that families from all ethnicities— Sinhala, Tamil and Muslim— were participant members of the new class. Jayawardena contends that colonial rule ensured that wealth and a consumerist lifestyle were no longer largely coincident with caste lines. She convincingly argues that despite caste polemics through pamphlets, the emergent struggle in the late nineteenth century was one of class and that caste polemics actually represented an intra-class struggle.

Jayawardana’s book, however, is not a simple class analysis. She deftly points out the links between the Sinhala capitalist class and the rise of the Sinhala...