A maritime community of the south-western and western coasts, historically associated with the sea, and by the nineteenth century one of the most commercially and professionally successful groups on the island.
Origins, and the argument about them
The standard account holds that the Karava arrived on the island's coasts from South India between roughly the thirteenth and the sixteenth centuries, and connects the name to the Tamil karaiyar, "people of the coast".
The Karava have contested this reading for well over a century. Their own tradition asserts descent from Kshatriya lineages — a warrior and ruling ancestry rather than a fishing one — and points to heraldic devices, flags, titles and settlement patterns preserved in the community as evidence of it. Michael Roberts's study of the community treats this not as folklore but as a sustained and effective counter-argument, mounted in print, in litigation and in public life, against a ranking the Karava regarded as imposed rather than inherited.1
The wider point matters beyond this one community. Migration from South India is attested for very many groups in Sri Lanka, including several now counted as ancient. Treating late arrival as grounds for low rank is not a historical finding; it is the claim the ranking was built to justify.2
Traditional occupations
Karava occupations centred on the sea: deep-sea and lagoon fishing, boat-building, navigation, and the coastal trade that connected the island's ports to southern India and beyond. Fishing communities held detailed practical knowledge — of monsoon timing, currents, net and craft design — that the standard one-line description of the community as "fishermen" entirely conceals.
Under colonial rule
The coastal position that ranked the Karava low in the inland scheme proved decisive once the island's economy turned outward. Portuguese, Dutch and British rule concentrated commerce, shipping and later plantation capital on precisely the south-western littoral where the Karava were established.
The result was one of the most striking social transformations in modern Sri Lankan history. Karava families moved into shipping, arrack renting, gem trading, graphite, coconut and later rubber; from commerce into the professions; and from the professions into public life. By the late nineteenth century the community had produced a substantial mercantile and professional elite, and Roberts's Caste Conflict and Elite Formation is a book-length account of how it happened.1
Religion
When the Siyam Nikaya restricted higher ordination to Govigama candidates in 1764, Karava Buddhists were among those cut off from a valid ordination lineage. Karava laymen and candidates took part in the expeditions to Burma that produced the Amarapura Nikaya after 1800 — a lineage founded by lay collective action rather than royal patronage.3 The community also has a large Catholic population, a legacy of Portuguese missions along this coast, and Karava Catholic and Buddhist institutions have both been significant in the region.
Today
The Karava are usually estimated as the second-largest Sinhalese community after the Govigama, though as with every such figure this rests on inference rather than census data. Community organisations, among them the Kshatriya Maha Sabha, have long maintained the case for the community's own account of its descent.