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Matale rebellion

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Background

The Kandyan provinces were in a state of turmoil. They had been under British rule for 32 years. Under the Crown Lands (Encroachments) Ordinance No. 12 of 1840 (sometimes called the Crown Lands Ordinance or the Waste Lands Ordinance), European planters had expropriated the common land of the peasantry and reduced them to penury. In the 1830s, coffee was introduced into Ceylon, a crop which flourishes in high altitudes, and grown on the land taken from the peasants. The principal impetus to this development was the decline in coffee production in the West Indies, following the abolition of slavery there.

However, the dispossessed peasantry were not employed on the plantations: The Kandyan villagers refused to abandon their traditional subsistence holdings and become wage-workers in the nightmarish conditions that prevailed on these new estates, despite all the pressure exerted by the colonial state. The British therefore had to draw on its reserve army of labour in India, to man its lucrative new outpost to the south. An infamous system of contract labour was established, which transported hundreds of thousands of Tamil 'coolies' from southern India into Sri Lanka for the coffee estates. These Tamils labourers started working on the plantations.

An economic depression in the United Kingdom had severely affected the local coffee and cinnamon industry. Planters and merchants clamoured for a reduction of export duties. Sir James Emerson Tennent, the Colonial Secretary in Colombo recommended to Earl Grey, Secretary of State for the Colonies in London that taxation should be radically shifted from indirect taxation to direct taxation, which proposal was accepted. It was decided to abolish the export duty on coffee and reduce the export duty on cinnamon leaving a deficit of £40,000 Sterling which was to be met by direct taxes on the people. A new Governor, 35-year-old Lord Torrington, a cousin of Prime Minister Lord Russell was dispatched to Colombo by Queen Victoria to carry out these reforms.

On 1 July 1848, license fees were imposed on guns, dogs, carts, shops and labour was made compulsory on plantation roads, unless a special tax was paid. These taxes bore heavily not only on the purse but also on the traditions of the Kandyan peasant. A mass movement against the oppressive taxes was developing. The masses were without the leadership of their native King (deposed in 1815) or their chiefs (either crushed after the Uva Rebellion or collaborating with the colonial power). The leadership passed for the first time in the Kandyan provinces into the hands of ordinary people.

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