Sinhalese society is made up of many communities. This section describes them one by one — their own histories, their own institutions, their own accounts of themselves.
Why this section exists
An archive devoted to one community can easily do a quiet violence to the others: mention them once, define them by the work their ancestors did, and move on. That is how a hierarchy is reproduced without ever being argued for. This site did exactly that until recently, and this section is the correction.
Each page here covers origins and the disputes about them, traditional occupations, what changed under colonial rule, religious and educational institutions, and the present day. They are written to the same standard and at the same length as the Govigama material, because there is no defensible reason to do otherwise.
A note on origins and rank
Two claims recur in writing about Sinhalese caste and both deserve caution.
The first is that the coastal communities — Karava, Salagama and Durava — arrived from South India between the thirteenth and eighteenth centuries, and are therefore later and lesser. The migration itself is well attested, but so is migration into every other part of the island's population, including groups now counted as ancient. The inference from "arrived later" to "ranks lower" is not history; it is the argument that the ranking was invented to support. The Karava in particular have advanced a detailed rival account of their own descent, and have disputed the standard ordering in print for well over a century.1
The second is that the ranking itself is ancient and settled. Much of the fixed, codified hierarchy familiar today was hardened — and in places created — by Portuguese, Dutch and British administrators who needed a legible social order for taxation, compulsory labour and appointment to office.2
Where communities disagree about their own history, this site says so rather than choosing a winner.
A note on numbers
Sri Lanka has not recorded caste in its census since 1911. Every population figure in circulation — for any community, including the Govigama — is inference from old data, and should be read as an order of magnitude rather than a measurement.2
Corrections
These pages are written from published scholarship by people outside the communities they describe. If something here is wrong, incomplete, or put badly, we would rather hear it than keep it. Get in touch.