The term myth is used here, as in the text, not as an indication that the account is necessarily false, but that it is accepted and transmitted without regard for, or enquiry into, its veracity.

Both of the accounts reproduced here have been influential and widely quoted. The significance of the first, the Report of the Kandyan Peasantry Commission (1951), has been discussed in Chapter Four. The book by Sarkar and Thambaiyah, entitled The Disintegrating Village, appeared a few years later in 1957, and was the outcome of a rural survey in the Kandyan areas.

There are differences of interpretation and emphasis between the two accounts. These are of a kind one might expect to find between an official report and the work of independent social scientists. The former places more emphasis on the alleged harmony and unity of pre-colonial social and economic life, on the integrating cultural role of Buddhism in this life, and in the loss of ‘community’ as a socio-cultural phenomenon. The latter is more willing to trace contemporary poverty to exploitation and inequality within village society. The commonalities between the two accounts are, however, striking, and virtually complete when they are assessing the material, cultural and socioeconomic impact of plantation development/commercialisation.