Land Registration in Sri Lanka, Fifteenth–Seventeenth Centuries

In the patchwork of smaller kingdoms spread across pre-colonial Sri Lanka, a system of land ownership existed whereby the “lord of the lands” (bhupati) owned all the domains within his territory. To maintain a plot of land that belonged to these kings, individuals had to either pay taxes or perform labor services based on their caste status, locally known as the rājakāriya duty.Footnote ¹⁵ But rather than being this direct king–subject relationship, in practice, this system was maintained through a much more localized and indirect structure in which labor duties were performed by lower caste families for higher caste families, and taxes were collected by local headmen, rather than by direct representatives of the king.Footnote ¹⁶ The actual registration of this temporary ownership and parallel duties and taxes to the king happened on a village level, where kanakkuppillai Footnote ¹⁷ or local scribes drew up deeds in the Sinhalese language on palm leaves for private real estate transactions, which were officialized by village heads through their approval in the form of signatures.

As was observed by Berkwitz in his seminal piece on the material aspect of Buddhist manuscripts in Sri Lanka, the practice of drying the palm leaves and inscribing them was a labor-intensive process that turned it into craftsmanship.Footnote ¹⁸ Therefore, olas were considered valuable possessions not only for what was inscribed on them, but also for their materiality, with some even attaining what can be a considered a sacramental value.Footnote ¹⁹ While Berkwitz considered Buddhist manuscripts specifically, which of itself increased this value on pure merit, more practical olas, such as deeds, wills, and registers, were similarly held in high regard. For example, for the British period we have descriptions of olas containing cosmic threats of what would happen if the terms of the deed were ever violated, which often include torturous rebirths in hell.Footnote ²⁰ Such threats were so common that they almost seem to have become a Sinhala legalese trope as much as a religious statement, suggesting the social worth of such documents.Footnote ²¹

Next to this (near-)sacred value of the material, there was also a practical tradition when it came to the olas. By the early modern period, Sri Lanka had become a hub for ola inscribing, with many professional craftsmen working for both temples and courts to make palm leaf manuscripts.Footnote ²² When it comes to land registration using such olas, the exact practices in Sri Lankan history remain elusive. Based on what we know from the Indian subcontinent,Footnote ²³ and from the fact that during the Portuguese and Dutch periods such practices have also been described,Footnote ²⁴ it seems almost every village had its own scribes who assisted the local chiefs in recording property and taxes. Additionally, we know that a centralized registration of land and taxes existed in the form of the lēkam miti registers, maintained by the courts of the kingdoms of Kotte and Kandy.Footnote ²⁵ The connection between the two spheres of registration must have existed, but the exact mechanism remains unknown; most likely these locally produced olas were copied into the centralized registers by court administrators, and the original ones remained in private possession.

Both these localized networks of village scribes and a more centralized registration system persisted throughout the Portuguese (1505–1658) and Dutch (1658–1796) colonial periods, and even until early British rule in the nineteenth century. They were used by the colonial powers to maintain the earlier-mentioned rājakāriya system, like the pre-colonial kings had done before them. And thus, although they were political nemeses, Portuguese and Dutch colonial rule in Sri Lanka was largely based on the same premises; namely, their appropriation of the position of the pre-colonial bhupati.Footnote ²⁶ Early Portuguese and Dutch intermingling with this system was marked by somewhat contradicting policies in which, on the one hand, the respective colonial governments tried to maintain the system of indirect rule, while on the other hand, they tried to benefit much more directly from the claimed bhupati position.Footnote ²⁷ Portuguese policies regarding land (and labor) illustrate the dynamic that was prevalent throughout the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. According to Serrão, the Portuguese colonial officials in Sri Lanka were instructed from the metropole to establish their policy on two clear pillars: first, they were to acquaint and familiarize themselves with the local systems; thereafter they were to “take it over and run it according to the Portuguese interests.”Footnote ²⁸ This led to a form of governance in which only the land and people that were directly beneficial to the Iberian Crown were taken into official policy, while the rest was left “as is.” In this respect, continuity can be observed between the Portuguese and early Dutch periodsFootnote ²⁹: foremost the specific focus on the harvest and protection of cinnamon, by claiming lands that were to remain untouched to protect the cinnamon growing there,Footnote ³⁰ and by recruiting members of the salāgama caste as permanent cinnamon peelers for the colonial state. But both the Portuguese and the Dutch also employed a reward system for loyal subjects serving as, for example, native headmen, local officials, and indigenous soldiers (lascarins), who received plots of land as compensation for their service. The “best” plots of land directly surrounding the colonial forts were granted to European settlers or the most loyal local families.Footnote ³¹

To facilitate such policy—for this study most prominently the land grants—the Portuguese and Dutch colonial states needed information about the lands and the people they governed. Already early on, an extensive bureaucracy was installed, again inspired by a local system. The lēkam miti of the kingdom of Kotte was first translated by the Portuguese in 1599, and later reworked in what the Portuguese dubbed the tombo (tome, volume) registers.Footnote ³² Together with the foral (charter) revenue registers, the tombos contained information on the lands eligible for taxation, and people whose (caste-based) services could be exploited.Footnote ³³ Under the efforts of the first Dutch governors, this practice was continued, although it would later fall into disuse and become significantly fragmented until it was revived as a centralized system from the second half of the eighteenth century, as we shall see below.Footnote ³⁴ Interestingly, where the Portuguese tombos were recorded on a village-level, the Dutch thombos (generally spelled with an “h”) contained details on the level of the individual.Footnote ³⁵

Despite the latter inconsistency, land policy was mostly a matter of (attempted) continuation between the Portuguese and early Dutch periods. Their efforts at exploiting their self-proclaimed position as bhupati had a fairly significant impact on the land and population directly surrounding the colonial centers of power: the port towns. However, the lands beyond were hardly reached and a lot of political power there remained with local elites such as the kōrāla and mudaliyār chiefs.Footnote ³⁶ The VOC would continue to mostly focus on cinnamon, and to a lesser extent elephants and areca nuts, and as such, their interest in an island-wide administration naturally decreased in the late seventeenth century. Lands were almost exclusively granted within the limits of what was considered Colombo and its outskirts, and some strategic settlements along the coastline (see Figure 2).Footnote ³⁷ This policy would continue for a few decades but was shaken up by a large transition that started in the 1740s.

Figure 2.

Locations of land in Sri Lanka handed out by Dutch colonial government via land grants between 1679 and 1689.

Dutch Land Policies: Ideological Changes and Reform, 1740–96

As has been described by Kotelawele, Gustaaf Willem baron van Imhoff (r. 1736–40) was the first governor to break with the general disinterest in local agriculture that had manifested itself in Dutch colonial rule up until his governance.Footnote ³⁸ He would introduce policies that would significantly change the social and economic makeup of the colony. Van Imhoff was of the opinion that it would be to the benefit of both the Company and the local population if the island's local economy was to be improved.Footnote ³⁹ To do so, he proposed a much more significant focus on the products that were either already being grown on the island or would be very suitable for growth there. In short, he wanted to grant as much land to local farmers as possible to intensify the growth of economically viable produce. For example, one plan was to have the local people grow cash crops on their lands that could be bought by the Company, who in turn would sell it on either the European or Asian markets, like tobacco, pepper, and coffee.Footnote ⁴⁰ Additionally, he proposed that the Company would put in the effort to reinstall the centralized thombo registry so that the VOC would know who owned what land, and could tax appropriately. Up until then these forms of registrations were supervised by the kōrāla chiefs, and by implementing a unified thombo register Van Imhoff likely wanted to bypass the power of these traditional local elites.Footnote ⁴¹ To expedite this process, he recommended his successors to establish rural councils (Landraden) to deal with all such local affairs, from the compilation of the land and population registers to potential legal conflicts surrounding land, tenure, or taxation.Footnote ⁴²

While neither of these reforms were actually implemented during Van Imhoff's reign, his direct successors would follow up on his recommendations. Under the rule of Governor Julius Valentyn Stein van Gollenesse (r. 1743–51) significant changes were introduced to promote the collection of agricultural produce, both indirectly by auctioning off some of the “traditional” taxable products to renters, and directly through the promotion and purchasing of introduced cash crops such as coffee.Footnote ⁴³ While the implementation of renters as tax collectors led to significant social turmoil at first, for example, because people deemed to be of a lower social standing were collecting the taxes of high-caste communities, farming out taxes became the primary mode of income for the VOC as early as 1760.Footnote ⁴⁴ In a similar fashion, the implementation of the “new” thombos led to significant protests from the communities that were to be registered in the 1740s, however, by 1760, an estimated 250,000 individuals and their landed property were recorded and it was reported to Batavia that the registers would help greatly in regard to taxation and exploitation of labor duties, and to solve land conflicts amongst locals.Footnote ⁴⁵

This colonial transition had immense consequences for the population of Sri Lanka's southwestern regions under Dutch control.Footnote ⁴⁶ While VOC policy making was far from consistent, as has been observed by Schrikker, the economic focus of the colony changed rapidly.Footnote ⁴⁷ This further necessitated additional administration and, as we shall see below, significantly increased the reach of the encroaching colonial bureaucratic apparatus.Footnote ⁴⁸ While the process of bureaucratization was one that was negotiable and strongly influenced by local agents, concepts, categories, and infrastructures,Footnote ⁴⁹ it also increased the colonial state's legibility of and thus influence on the hinterland.Footnote ⁵⁰ Similar to other areas in South Asia, most interactions regarding—and administration of—caste-based labor, land ownership and tenure, and taxation were increasingly organized by a foreign colonial state (rather than on a village level).Footnote ⁵¹

Land deeds are a perfect example to function as a proxy for the increased bureaucratization of the Dutch civil government.Footnote ⁵² Already from the early days of Dutch rule such deeds, most prominently the giftebrieven (gift deeds), formalized a gift of land to loyal subjects, in an effort to tie them and their progeny closer to the government. Such deeds were relatively small pieces of paper noting the plot(s) of land in question, the proprietor, and the reason they were granted the land, and were officially signed by the governor. While the actual granting of land was naturally a non-physical practice, the giftebrief itself solidified this act (similar to how the thombos recognized one's land ownership). Certainly in the last two decades of the seventeenth century, the Dutch saw this as a valuable instrument to establish their sovereignty over the coastal cities under their control and the direct hinterland, with about forty deeds handed out on average every year for plots in the city center and the suburbs of Colombo, the so-called Four Gravets (see Figure 2). However, around the turn of the eighteenth century the momentum had passed, and barely one grant per month was stamped by the Dutch officials, and the officials in question seem to have gone back to granting lands using olas.Footnote ⁵³ This changed again when, influenced by the aforementioned policy changes of the 1740s, the VOC's bureaucracy became increasingly interested in land registration again. Subsequently, a massive increase in grants in the form of giftebrieven can be observed from the 1740s onwards (see Figure 3). Not only did the amount of the grants change significantly, but the apparent reach of the grants also changed as well. Where before 1745 almost all giftebrieven considered plots of land directly surrounding colonial port cities like Colombo and Negombo, after 1745, a majority of the lands that were granted by the VOC were situated in the hinterland, which suggests an increasing encroachment of the Dutch colonial bureaucracy on Sri Lanka's hinterlands, and with this encroachment forms of symbolic violence to appropriate the system of land registration, as we shall see subsequently (see Figures 4 and 5).

Figure 3.

Land deeds granted by Dutch colonial government in Sri Lanka for land in forts, suburbs, and hinterland, 1679–1795.

Figure 4.

Number of land deeds per location in 1740.

Figure 5.

Number of land deeds per location in 1750.

Material Pluralism and Symbolic Violence

The growing encroachment of Dutch land registration on the hinterland from the 1740s onwards—both with the thombo administration in general and the giftebrieven in particular—was accompanied by a bureaucratic shift as well. The continuing efforts to record ever more land in the rural hinterlands of Sri Lanka were not only attempts to establish Dutch sovereignty, but also coincided with a material modification. The intention was to move away from traditional palm leaf records towards Dutch paperwork, which up until then had co-existed in a spectre of material pluralism, as, apart from the areas directly surrounding the Dutch colonial forts (such as the ones in Colombo, Galle and Jaffna), most hinterland regions were still recorded locally on olas, which at times were translated and copied to paper.Footnote ⁵⁴

As we noted above, the age-old Sinhalese practice of recording private land transactions on palm leaves did not disappear with the advent of colonial governments and their paper empires. The Portuguese and later the Dutch used their official system of state-driven land donations to tie loyal subjects to the colonial government, while at the same time ensuring the further cultivation of fallow land. But next to this colonial system, the real estate market continued to exist, and Sinhalese, Moorish, Chettiyar, and European subjects kept on privately selling and buying land and houses all throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. From the onset onwards—and even before the last Portuguese had been forced off the island in 1658—the Dutch civil administration had attempted to infringe on this private land market of Sri Lanka. A 1648 ordinance promulgated for the southern city of Galle gives us an insight into their attempts to regulate land transactions.Footnote ⁵⁵ Under the pretence that they regularly witnessed disputes between Sinhalese subjects in Galle “because there are no proper deeds of buying and selling,” from that point on all transactions concerning real estate had to be registered with two Dutch administrators of the newly established Court of First Instance. Transactions in the hinterland were to be communicated to two local village headmen (mayorāls), who would draw up an ola deed on palm leaves. In turn these headmen would register these rural transactions with the urban clerks on their yearly visit to Galle, inscribing these palm leaf deeds into the Dutch paper trail. This process was to ensure that local transactions of land could be traced (and where subsequently recognized) by the Dutch colonial bureaucracy. Moreover, during that process, the Dutch clerk in the city would add a date on the back of the palm leaf, making it into an official transaction deed. This physical intervention in the materiality of the palm leaves was a recurring theme in the Dutch interventions in the local registration practices, not only in the densely populated southwestern part of the island, but also in the northern region surrounding the city of Jaffna. When subjects wanted to prove that they had presented the thombo-administrator with their palm leaf evidence in order to avoid additional taxation, this Dutch official was instructed to write the date on the back side of the original ola.Footnote ⁵⁶ Interestingly, this implies that as of themselves, locally produced olas were inherently recognized by the colonial government, but officially only when seen and signed by a colonial official, even though in civil court cases unsigned olas were seemingly accepted by colonial councillors as readily as signed ones.

In the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, the Dutch government allowed a system of material pluralism, whereby multiple types of documents related to land registration co-existed: paper giftebrieven from governors or district heads, private sales drawn up before a Dutch notary or sworn clerk (often from mixed background), Sinhalese palm leaf deeds by village scribes and certified by village headmen, and, of course, the thombo registers. However, plurality did not necessarily imply equality: in an effort to establish their sovereignty over the real estate market, the Dutch increasingly attempted to draw ola deeds into their paper empire by having their clerks physically carve into the palm leaves. More than merely stamping them bureaucratically, the Dutch also harmed the material integrity of these sacralized olas. These interventions by Dutch clerks thus cannot be downplayed, as these were acts of symbolic violence, establishing hierarchies of power by mutilating age-old forms of land registration, and attempts at establishing the sovereignty of a colonial legal regime.Footnote ⁵⁷

Additionally, in the wake of the establishment of the Landraden in the 1740s and parallel legislation on land registration, the Dutch became more adamant in their efforts to control the real estate market. On the side of the land donations, a 1745 ordinance proclaimed that from then on, local subjects had 3 months to hand in their palm leaf deeds—which had been granted to them by the colonial district head or disāva Footnote ⁵⁸—and receive a paper giftebrief in return to prove their ownership of land. This exchange operation was part of a much larger machinery to re-evaluate the key role of land grants in establishing the Dutch sovereignty over the coastal regions, and the island's agricultural economy. Unfortunately, the archival material does not allow us to distinguish between exchanged ola deeds and new land grants, but the sharp rise in the total number of granted giftebrieven after 1745 seems to indicate that the normative efforts of the Dutch to get more control over land ownership via the system of land donations was successfully translated into actual policy (see Figure 3). But bear in mind that the original target audience of the land grants had always been loyal Sinhalese subjects, with the land grant as a token of appreciation for their service to the Dutch colonial government. It should perhaps be not that surprising then that (the progeny of) these loyal subjects answered the call of this ordinance and were accommodating the government in this exchange operation. After all, complying with this request would re-establish their ownership over the land and strengthen their legal claim. The overwhelming wave of land grants to non-European subjects—and in general to people not even employed by the Company—in the second quarter of the eighteenth century further supports that hypothesis, or at least showcases the growing encroachment of the Dutch colonial government on state-driven Sinhalese land ownership (and that of other local communities) via land grants (see Figure 6).Footnote ⁵⁹

Figure 6.

Land deeds granted by the Dutch colonial government in Sri Lanka according to social background, 1679–1795.

In May 1757, the Dutch colonial government copied this procedure from their core business of land grants to the regular real estate market, as they issued a similar exchange operation.Footnote ⁶⁰ All subjects had 1 year and 6 weeks to come to the Dutch clerk to certify their ownership in Dutch paper registration. In addition, from then on nobody was allowed anymore to sell, trade, or alienate real estate, land, or vessels on “private bills or olas” any more, but rather all of these transactions had to be made known to a Dutch clerk. Given the general shift in Dutch attention to the agricultural profit of Sri Lanka—for which they had installed the Landraden and breathed new life into the thombo registration—the financial motives behind this second exchange program from olas to paper registration are not difficult to establish. Although the Dutch continued to stress the benefits that a solid land registration would yield for local subjects—just like they did in the mid-seventeenth century—they were quite explicit about their own interests in the ordinance from 1757. They honestly stated that the private transactions on ola deeds outside of the reach of Dutch clerks were “to great detriment of the country's income” and that “the lord of the land suffered damage” when subjects did not register ownership.Footnote ⁶¹

Although this ordinance from the late 1750s proclaims tough punishments for those subjects who failed to comply with the material exchange operation, in itself it of course reveals a Dutch failure to control the private real estate market. Too many transactions had been happening outside of the reach of the Dutch civil administration in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.Footnote ⁶² This frustration was channelled through and targeted at the materiality of these private land deeds and the persistent network of local village scribes who were often not directly employed by the Company. From the 1740s onwards, the negative Dutch attitude toward palm leaf deeds as inferior to paperwork and to village scribes as being less trustworthy than Dutch clerks became ever more explicit in the official normative communication. More than once, Dutch ordinances referred to deceitful olas in the same sentences as invalid notes or used the diminutive form “little olas” (olatjes and briefjes), always in sharp contrast with the official paperwork and legal mark of quality from a Dutch clerk.Footnote ⁶³

But whereas the exchange operation and general re-evaluation of the state-driven land grants had positive effects for the colonial government—at least as measured in the number of land grants of the 1740s to the 1760s (see Figure 6)—the Dutch attempt to gain control over the private land market with the 1757 ordinance seems to have been less successful. As the Dutch pushed their paper empire ever more forcefully onto the rural hinterland of Sri Lanka from the 1740s onwards, the age-old palm leaf registration proved resilient and widespread. This tension field was never fully resolved during the Dutch rule on the island; on the contrary, all throughout the eighteenth century, indigenous officials in Dutch colonial bureaucracies kept on using olas for their reports. For example, the local envoys of the VOC (saparamādu ) and other “indigenous commissioners” carved out their reports in Sinhalese on palm leaves, which were later translated and put to paper by sworn clerks.Footnote ⁶⁴ Additionally, people continued to use olas to record private real estate transactions. But even in the highest echelons of Dutch colonial bureaucracy, the olas remained in use; up until the very end the disāva—who was a Dutch official after all—kept on handing out land grants on palm leaves, silently acknowledging the tenacity and perhaps even pre-eminence of olas in the system of material pluralism that the Dutch had to allow in eighteenth-century Sri Lanka.Footnote ⁶⁵

Layering Legal Regimes of Documenting Land and Property

Despite this growing Dutch discomfort and blatant attempts at downplaying the role of olas in the real estate market of the southwestern part of Sri Lanka, palm leaf deeds remained an integral part of recording the everyday and the extraordinary in the life of Sinhalese villagers (cf. Berkwitz). Legal battles over land ownership fought out before the Dutch colonial courts in the second half of the eighteenth century showcase the constant field of friction between the Dutch paper empire and the palm leaf reality of everyday legalities. Colonial Dutch courts in that sense are perfect laboratories to study material pluralism in Sri Lanka before the advent of British colonial rule at around 1800.

A particular case study invites us to further reflect on the intricate relationship between different systems of land registration, and the underlying material pluralism in colonial Sri Lanka. A civil suit between two Sinhalese men takes us from the lowest rural council in the Galle province to the highest appellate court in colonial Sri Lanka, involving private lease and transaction olas, two series of public land thombos, and subsequent registrations in the Dutch paper empire between the mid-1750s and the mid-1790s.Footnote ⁶⁶ The case revolves around a particular plot of land in the village of Mabotuwana,Footnote ⁶⁷ about 20 km inland northwest of the city of Galle. A young Sinhalese man named Lookanmattege Silvester lived in the suburbs of Galle together with his uncle. Silvester's grandfather had left his eight children each a fraction of the family land in Mabotuwana. Subsequently, when Silvester's parents had passed away he and his sister (who was at the time unmarried), collectively inherited one eighth of that family plot, similar to their uncle's share. Interestingly, however, Silvester would go on to put this share up for collateral, either with his sister's blessing or without her knowing.

To be precise, in 1763, Silvester and his uncle decided to jointly pledge their share (two eighths) as collateral for a loan they received from the Sinhalese man Goeroegammege, who was the Sinhalese chief (vidāne) of Lelwala, a larger settlement nearby Mabotuwana. Eight years later, that vidāne wanted to buy those two eighths of land from Silvester and his uncle. Following Sinhalese customary law, Silvester and his uncle publicly stated in the village of Mabotuwana that they wanted to renounce their two-eighth portions, allowing relatives, nearby and far away, to exercise their right to buy this land back into the family, which always trumped interested purchasers from outside of the family. However, as none of the children or grandchildren of Silvester's grandfather (including Silvester's sister) showed any interest, the vidāne was able to buy the land for a sum of 18 rijksdaalders, the value as officially taxed by five “experienced men.” Silvester, his uncle, and the vidāne then went down to a sworn clerk of the village, who drew up a Sinhalese transaction ola, signed by the village headmen (mayorāls) as witnesses of that transaction. With this Sinhalese transaction ola on palm leaf, the vidāne then went to the colonial thombo administrator just outside Galle, who took out the Dutch land register of Mabotuwana, which he had drawn up 12 years earlier (1759), and wrote down the vidāne's name as new owner of the two eighths of land.

With these consecutive steps to register their land transaction, Silvester and Goeroegammege followed the procedure that the Dutch colonial government had gradually pushed onto the private land market. The 1648 ordinance for Galle still provided the guidebook more than a century later, but the crucial layer of the local thombo administrator and the parallel land register were relatively new, only built in the system with the installment of Landraden from the 1740s onwards (see section “Land Registration in Sri Lanka” for an explanation of the [dis]continuities between the Portuguese and Dutch thombos). This legal procedure exemplifies the larger shift in Dutch colonial policy on the island from one of indirect rule, tapping into pre-existing power structures and hierarchies, to a system of more direct governance, bypassing traditional elites (in this case the mayorāls) in favor of appointed officials in the Dutch bureaucracy.

In the meantime, Silvester's sister had gotten married and when she died in 1788, her husband, the schoolmaster Abraham de Zilva from Galle, claimed his late wife's share (her half of the one eighth) of that family land. He turned to the by-then poverty-stricken Silvester, who agreed to sell him the one eighth of the family land that he already sold to the vidāne 17 years earlier; Abraham was of course not aware of this earlier transaction.Footnote ⁶⁸ Without informing the mayorāls in Mabotuwana, Silvester immediately turned to the Landraad, and asked them to transfer his property rights to his brother-in-law and have him inscribed as the new owner of his fraction of the family land in the Dutch thombo registers. The Landraad instructed the thombo administrator to find out if there were other family members still alive who could potentially claim part of this land, and if not, to officialize the transaction in the land registers. For some reason, the thombo record-keeper did not consult the village heads in Mabotuwana or the 1759 Dutch land registers, and pinned down the schoolmaster as the official owner in the 1788 update of the “old” thombo. Perhaps this was exactly what Silvester intended, knowing full well that he was selling the share of the family land that he and his sister had inherited for the second time.

Here, the dubious role of the thombo administrator shows that there were inherent risks for the Dutch colonial government in taking matters into their own bureaucracy away from the mayorāls, particularly if protocol and tradition were not adequately adhered to; not only did the thombo administrator fail to consult the village heads of Mabotuwana in 1788 about the initial transaction from 1771, but he also ignored the written entry in his own thombo register of 1759. Both the traditional act of registration with the village chiefs and the Dutch colonial register remained untapped by the thombo administrator, resulting in the chaotic double ownership and parallel legal issues. What should have been an improvement of the seventeenth-century system turned out to be failure, at least in this case. But more than just the errors of this administrator, and through it the failure of the system he represented, this case also exemplifies how legal regimes of documentation became increasingly layered over time in eighteenth-century Sri Lanka. Moreover, it shows how such layering could potentially cause very specific risks and tensions, both between the colonial state bureaucracy and colonized subjects and also among bureaucratic agents and local (extended) families respectively, as we shall see.

Five months later De Zilva, the schoolmaster, apparently discovered the double ownership, and went to the European district head of Galle (disāva) to claim sole ownership of “his” land. However, the disāva refuted the schoolmaster's assertion and re-affirmed the (by now) former vidāne's ownership of both Silvester's fraction as well as his uncle's. In addition, the disāva put the blame on Silvester for reselling the same piece of land on two occasions, almost 20 years apart. So despite admitting that Silvester had been in the wrong, he did recognize and uphold the original transaction among Silvester, his uncle, and the vidāne as recorded in the ola and in the (old) thombo .

Although the district head made a clear arbitration decision, the schoolmaster was still unsatisfied, and a couple of years later he turned to the lower-ranked local head (kōrāla) of the Galle kōralē (district), who in turn forwarded his request to the Galle Landraad. The court started up an official investigation into this dispute that had been dragging on for over two decades, and after considering all the elements, the Landraad decided in favour of the schoolmaster in 1793. The Landraad then ordered the thombo administrator to nullify the 1771 Sinhalese transaction ola, on the condition that the purchase price of 18 rijksdaalders be repaid to the former vidāne. The court argued that the schoolmaster as brother-in-law was more entitled to the family land than the former vidāne; moreover, as by the early 1790s, Silvester appeared to be the only living relative, the entirety of the family land in Mabotuwana was his by inheritance. The altered entry in the 1788 thombo register remained final.

Interestingly, none of the colonial courts, litigating parties, or even the disāva or kōrāla explicitly accused the thombo administrator for his earlier blatant errors, nor did they link up these issues to larger systemic failures. For most of them, Silvester, as original owner, had done the wrong thing by selling the same fraction of land twice. Silvester in turn defended himself by claiming that he was convinced that even with the 1771 ola to Goeroegammege, he had only pledged the land temporarily, and that full ownership remained his. The only party involved who targeted the thombo administrator was Goeroegammege, who placed this administrator and his registers at the crossroads of Dutch legislation and Sinhalese tradition by stating that the thombo administrator—by recording this error—contravened both the Dutch ordinances such as the one from 1648, as well as the “order and tradition of times immemorial.”Footnote ⁶⁹ The former vidāne Goeroegammege was obviously not content with this ruling, and decided to appeal against the verdict of the Landraad to the Court of Justice in Galle in 1794. The council members there even forwarded the case file to the highest appellate court in Colombo, to discuss this complicated matter of land ownership. And although the appellate verdict was not archived, the secretary of the Galle Court of Justice himself explicitly questioned the validity of the earlier Landraad verdict in his writings to Colombo. Therefore, it seems that in the end the odds turned in favor of the former vidāne.

This rich case study of the uneasy interaction of palm leaf deeds and paper registers serves as a beautiful illustration of the complicated legal hybridity of land registration that dominated eighteenth-century colonial Sri Lanka. Silvester and his uncle had followed customary Sinhalese law in 1771 by publicly denouncing their property rights on three occasions to allow relatives to exercise their right to keep patrimony in the family. In this initial transaction both local scribes and village chiefs, as well as the thombo administrator were directly involved, the latter acting in relationship to the Landraad. Sinhalese palm leaf deeds co-existed with paper registers. As the eighteenth century progressed, colonial institutions and local practices of land transaction remained blurred, despite the Dutch attempts to separate them.

For the Dutch judiciary, this material pluralism and entangled systems of registering land transactions created a host of potential problem for everyday adjudication of rights to land. The case study of the vidāne and the schoolmaster shows how difficult it was for the Dutch judiciary to separate the wheat from the chaff and to establish an official record of the original ownership and later transactions. Certainly when the officious arbitration of the disāva and official litigation in the Landraad started contradicting each other, and subsequently the low, middle, and high courts disagreed on ownership, matters became complicated.

But in the end, one has to admit that this relative chaos offered remarkable room for negotiation of the subjects involved. The schoolmaster opted for the road of arbitration, by first petitioning directly to the disāva and then, when he felt unheard, to the kōrāla; Goeroegammege decided on the path of litigation, and used the judicial tools at hand, by appealing unfavorable verdicts to higher courts in the city. The different paths taken by the litigants in this case highlight the level of “forum shopping” that was afforded at the time, and the fact that some Asian actors opted to utilize Dutch colonial courts (directly), while others opted for more traditional paths (e.g. the schoolmaster addressing the disāva and kōrāla respectively).Footnote ⁷⁰ Moreover, however, this case highlights how, next to this legal pluralism, there was also a significant layering of materiality and documentation practices. While the Dutch had at times tried to hamper the legitimacy of the olas as legal documents, this case shows the entanglements of Dutch and local practices of the registration and documentation of land and land transactions.