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This section is being reviewed

We have received a report of inaccuracies in these community pages. They are currently being checked against published sources, and some statements may change. Please read them with that in mind — and if you find something wrong, we would rather hear it than keep it.
Communities of Sri Lanka

Durava

The Durava of Sri Lanka — the ten royal duties behind the name, Naga and Keralan descent, and prominence in the Buddhist revival, publishing and banking.

A coastal community of the south and west. The name records ten duties owed to the Sinhala court; the palm economy the community is identified with today came later, under colonial rule. Durava families were disproportionately present in the founding of modern Sri Lankan institutions — monastic, educational, journalistic and financial.

Origins and name

The community's own account traces its descent to the Naga clans of the southern littoral, and holds that the Durava took shape from the mingling of those coastal populations with Keralan settlers arriving from South India from the twelfth century onwards. On this account the Naga settlements of the south are the Durava villages of today. The standard colonial-era accounts instead describe an arrival from South India between the thirteenth and eighteenth centuries — a dating from which the inference "arrived later, therefore ranks lower" was drawn, and which this archive treats with caution wherever it appears.1

The name itself is explained from service to the royal court before the Portuguese arrived. The Durava occupation carried ten such obligations — dasa dura, the ten duras, also given as daha durava — and it is from these that the community's name is said to derive.

Hugh Nevill, the British civil servant whose ethnographic notebooks are among the fuller nineteenth-century records of Sinhalese communities, recorded royal connections in certain Durava families. E. W. Perera — the legislator remembered as the Lion of Kotte — wrote in Sinhala Banners and Standards (1916) that the red standard bearing the lion, borne by the Sinhala kings, had long served as a Durava emblem.2 Sir Paul E. Pieris endorsed these points in his work on the Portuguese period.3

Traditional occupations

The occupation most often attached to the Durava is toddy tapping. The association is younger than the community, and it was not chosen by it: coconut planting expanded sharply after the Portuguese arrival, the coconut industry was loaded onto the Durava, and the label rā madinnan — toddy tappers — dates from that imposition rather than from the community's earlier standing at court.

The work itself is skilled and genuinely dangerous, performed at height: drawing sap from the coconut and kitul palm, for drinking fresh, for fermenting, and for boiling down into treacle and jaggery. It sat at the centre of a wider palm economy — coconut cultivation, coir, arrack distillation, and the substantial revenues colonial governments drew from arrack renting.

Religion

The revival of Buddhist learning in the Kandyan provinces in the eighteenth century is associated above all with Welivita Saranankara.4 Working alongside him was Sitinamaluwe Dhammajoti Thera, a monk of the Durava community, who had accepted King Kirti Sri Rajasinha's invitation to the capital at a time when learning there had fallen into decay. The mission that brought higher ordination from Siam — and with it the Siyam Nikaya — was undertaken on his particular proposal.

What followed is therefore not a case of the Durava having stood apart from that fraternity's founding. In 1764 the Siyam Nikaya restricted higher ordination to Govigama candidates, and the Durava were among those excluded.5 Durava monks and laymen took part in the Burmese ordination missions that produced the Amarapura Nikaya, and the community financed part of that effort.5

The community's connection to the modern Buddhist revival runs further. Dona Mallika Dharmagunawardhana, the mother of Anagarika Dharmapala, was Durava.6 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.5

In Sinhala memory

Two figures who passed into Sinhala popular memory were Durava: Andare, the court wit whose stories are still told, and Gajaman Nona, the poet of the southern coast.

Where the community lives

In the Gampaha district the Durava villages include Thillanduwa, Seeduwa, Katunayake and Pallansena. In the Colombo district the community is numerous and well established from Ratmalana and Galkissa through to Wellawatte, and Durava families are prominent among the larger business houses of Colombo. Pallimulla and Gorakana at Panadura stand out among the early settlements, as does the village of Sitinamaluwa in the Hambantota district.

Further south, the towns of Unawatuna, Habaraduwa, Thalpe and Mihiripenna, the Matara electorate and the Hambantota district are the community's strongholds. In Matara in particular the Durava are held in high regard.

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.

References

  1. ↑ Rogers, John D. Caste as a Social Category and Identity in Colonial Lanka. Indian Economic and Social History Review 41(1). 2004. Argues that much of the fixed caste ranking recorded in Sri Lanka was shaped and hardened by colonial administrative practice.
  2. ↑ Perera, E. W. Sinhala Banners and Standards. 1916. Records the red standard bearing the lion, borne by the Sinhala kings, as a long-used Durava emblem. Cited on the Durava page.
  3. ↑ Pieris, Paul E. Ceylon: The Portuguese Era. Pieris worked from Portuguese and Dutch archival sources. Cited here for his endorsement of E. W. Perera on the Durava standard. Year left empty pending confirmation of the edition.
  4. ↑ Blackburn, Anne M. Buddhist Learning and Textual Practice in Eighteenth-Century Lankan Monastic Culture. Princeton University Press. 2001. Detailed study of Weliwita Saranankara and the eighteenth-century monastic revival.
  5. ↑ Malalgoda, Kitsiri. Buddhism in Sinhalese Society 1750–1900: A Study of Religious Revival and Change. University of California Press. 1976. The standard account of the Siyam Nikaya, the 1764 restriction of higher ordination, and the founding of the Amarapura and Ramanna fraternities.
  6. ↑ Gombrich, Richard and Obeyesekere, Gananath. Buddhism Transformed: Religious Change in Sri Lanka. Princeton University Press. 1988. Covers the modern Buddhist revival, including Anagarika Dharmapala.

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