An agricultural community of the Kandyan interior, historically holding land under service tenure. The community is referred to here only as Bathgama; the older term found in colonial sources is a slur and is not reproduced.
Land and service tenure
Bathgama families cultivated, and held land — but in much of the Kandyan interior they held it on terms that carried obligations of labour and service attached to the land itself, owed to a temple, a chief, or the crown. Under rajakariya, the general system of service due to the king, the specific obligations attached to particular holdings varied a great deal by community, and Bathgama tenures typically carried heavier and less negotiable duties than those of the landholding cultivators above them.1
This is the mechanism by which caste position translated into material circumstance in the interior. It was not primarily about ritual or precedence; it was about who owed what work to whom, and on what terms land could be held at all.
The end of the system
Rajakariya was formally abolished by the British in 1832 on the recommendation of the Colebrooke–Cameron commission. Abolition on paper and change on the ground were not the same thing: customary obligation, debt and unequal landholding persisted long after the legal basis was removed, and the interior districts changed more slowly than the coast.2
The modern era
The Bathgama are concentrated in the Kandyan districts — Kegalle, Kandy, Matale, Kurunegala and Sabaragamuwa. Land reform, free education from the 1940s and universal franchise altered the community's position substantially over the twentieth century, and community associations have been active in pressing for representation and access.