A community of the south-western coast whose traditional craft — the peeling and preparation of cinnamon — was for two centuries the single most valuable export of the island, and whose members led the challenge to caste restriction in the Buddhist order.
Origins
The Salagama are generally described as having arrived on the south-western coast from South India, with weaving among the occupations associated with the community before cinnamon came to define it. As with the other coastal communities, the migration account has been used to argue low rank, and as with the others that inference does not follow from the evidence.1
Cinnamon
It is difficult to overstate how much of Sri Lanka's early colonial history turns on cinnamon. Ceylon cinnamon was the finest in the world and effectively could not be got elsewhere; it was the reason the Portuguese came, the principal prize the Dutch took from them, and for a long period the most profitable commodity the Dutch East India Company handled anywhere.
Preparing it was skilled work. The bark had to be cut at the right age, peeled without damage, rolled and dried to grade — a craft learned over years, and one the colonial administrations could not do without. The Dutch consequently bound the Salagama into a compulsory service system, fixing the community to cinnamon work under close supervision, with quotas and punishments attached. The community's traditional occupation was, for a long stretch, less a trade than an obligation enforced by a foreign state.
Religion and the Amarapura Nikaya
When the Siyam Nikaya restricted higher ordination to Govigama candidates in 1764, Salagama Buddhists were among those excluded. The community was in the forefront of the response. Salagama laymen financed passage to Burma and Salagama candidates were among those ordained there, and the returning monks formed the nucleus of the Amarapura Nikaya from around 1800.2
This was not a minor administrative event. It was the first time in Sri Lankan history that a monastic lineage had been established by the collective action and money of lay Buddhists rather than by a king, and it broke a monopoly that had stood for a generation.
Education and the modern era
The Salagama were prominent in the Buddhist educational revival of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, in the founding of schools and pirivenas, and in Sinhala publishing and scholarship. The community is concentrated in the Kalutara, Galle and Matara districts.