One of the largest inland Sinhalese communities, traditionally associated with the production of jaggery and treacle from the kitul palm.
Occupation
The traditional craft is the tapping of the kitul palm and the boiling of its sap into treacle and jaggery — the island's principal sweetener before imported sugar, and a staple of both household cooking and temple offering. The work requires climbing mature palms, precise timing in tapping, and long controlled boiling; the product was traded widely inland.
Vahumpura households also cultivated, and the community is distributed across the interior — Sabaragamuwa, the Central Province, Uva and the North Western Province — rather than concentrated on a coast or in a single kingdom's core.
Rank and its consequences
Traditional ranking schemes placed the Vahumpura below the Govigama, and unlike the coastal communities the Vahumpura had little access to the colonial commercial economy that allowed the Karava, Salagama and Durava to convert wealth into standing. Inland, the older order persisted longer and its disadvantages were correspondingly harder to escape: less land, less access to office, and less access to the mission and Buddhist schools that were the route into the professions.
This is worth stating directly. Caste disadvantage in Sri Lanka was not evenly distributed, and the communities that remained agricultural and inland generally carried more of it for longer.
Organisation and the modern era
The Vahumpura have a long record of collective organisation — community associations, temple societies and, from the twentieth century, explicitly political mobilisation around representation, land and education. Given the community's size, its electoral weight in several inland districts has been significant.
As with every community here, population figures are estimates: caste has not been recorded in the census since 1911.1