A coastal community of the south and west, associated with the coconut and kitul palms, and disproportionately present in the founding of modern Sri Lankan institutions — monastic, educational, journalistic and financial.
Origins and name
The Durava are described in the standard accounts as having arrived on the southern coast from South India between the thirteenth and eighteenth centuries. The community is concentrated in the coastal belt from Panadura through Galle to Matara.
Traditional occupations
The occupation most often attached to the Durava is toddy tapping — drawing sap from the coconut and kitul palm, for drinking fresh, for fermenting, and for boiling down into treacle and jaggery. It is skilled and genuinely dangerous work performed at height, and it sat at the centre of a wider palm economy: coconut cultivation, coir, arrack distillation and the substantial revenues that colonial governments drew from arrack renting.
Religion
Durava Buddhists were among those excluded by the Siyam Nikaya's restriction of higher ordination to Govigama candidates in 1764. Durava monks and laymen took part in the Burmese ordination missions that produced the Amarapura Nikaya, and the community financed part of that effort.1
The community's connection to the modern Buddhist revival runs further. Dona Mallika Dharmagunawardhana, the mother of Anagarika Dharmapala, was Durava.2 Dharmapala's mixed parentage — a Govigama father and a Durava mother — stood in the way of his ordination under the caste rules then governing the fraternities, and is part of why the most consequential Buddhist figure of the modern era spent his life as a lay renunciant rather than a monk.1
The modern era
Durava families were prominent in nineteenth and twentieth-century Sinhala publishing, in the founding of Buddhist schools, and in commerce. N. U. Jayawardena, the first Ceylonese Governor of the Central Bank and later a major figure in Sri Lankan banking and industry, came from the community.
The pattern across the coastal communities is consistent and worth stating plainly: exclusion from one avenue of advancement — monastic office, state appointment — was met by building alternative institutions, and those institutions turned out to matter a great deal.