Uva heroes officially recognised after 188 years!

by Janaka Perera

Today marks the 188th anniversary of the execution at Bogambara, Kandy of patriot and national hero Monarawila Keppettipola, who led the 1817-18 Uva rebellion against the British.

This year's anniversary has a special significance since it was the present government that recently revoked a gazette notification that the British Colonial regime issued 188 years ago, branding 240 Kandyan Chieftains traitors. For 57 years after independence these patriots remained officially on the traitors list, since the notification was not revoked. Their descendants too were helpless in officially dealing with this grave injustice.

The document was issued on January 1, 1818, after Keppettipola, then Dissawe (provincial chief) of Uva, and other Kandyan Chieftains turned against the English rulers and joined the Uva rebellion that had commenced the previous year. Governor Robert Brownrigg's administration offered special rewards to those who would help to capture dead or alive 18 rebel leaders.

This historic gazette notification which is in the National Archives was revoked on the President's orders after it came to Highways Development Minister T. B. Ekanayake's attention. Under this notification the Colonial Government confiscated all the assets of these rebel chieftains. Keppettipola was the most wanted man since the British had never expected him to turn against them and join the rebels after being sent with an armed unit to suppress the `traitors.'

The rebellion spread through Wellassa, Bintenne, Ulapane, Hewaheta, Kotmale and Dumbara and continued for a year (October 1817 - October 1818). Sinhala peasants were subjected to horrible deaths - by execution, hunger and disease. The British laid waste to the entire area of Wellassa (meaning hundred thousand paddy lands). Many a Sinhala noble and bhikku linked to the rebellion were beheaded to terrorise the population.

No Sri Lankan Government will be able to totally undo the damage that the British did to the Uva Province socially, economically and culturally, in the course of brutally crushing the uprising. The repercussions of this genocidal scorched earth policy are felt to this day in the region, where entire villages were wiped out and crops and livestock destroyed. The soldiers went on the rampage after the Colonial Government declared Martial Law to combat the rebels who faced vastly superior odds. The rebels fought more in spirit than in might. Most of them were slaughtered, their barns plundered, their homes burnt and their lands confiscated. Many women and children died in ruthless retaliation. The London Times of October 7, 1818, reported: "the plan of destroying all the grain and fruit trees in the neighbourhood of Badulla seems to have been completely carried into effect, a dreadful measure."

Generations of poverty-stricken peasants of Wellassa have been paying the price of the havoc wrought by British troops. Nearly 50,000 Sinhala villagers have been suffering from malaria - a direct result of the British destroying thousands of acres of paddy land, irrigation works, many reservoirs and water ways to starve the population to death. The water that spilled into the surrounding areas turned Wellassa into a large mosquito breeding ground. Gradually, the jungle claimed the once-flourishing Wellassa, following over a century of neglect. The devastation was such that it was virtually impossible to restore the place to what it was before.

Justice Lawrie, Senior Puisne Judge in colonial Ceylon in A Gazetteer of the Central Province of Ceylon wrote: "... The story of English rule in the Kandyan country during 1817 and 1818 cannot be related without shame. In 1819 hardly a member of the leading families, the heads of the people, remained alive; those whom the sword and the gun had spared, cholera and small pox and privations had slain by the hundred." (Revolt in the Temple)

Keppettipola was arrested at Nuwara Kalaviya, Anuradhapura in October 1818. Following his arrest and that of his lieutenant Madugalle, both were tried by a Court Martial on November 13 and sentenced to death on November 26, 1818. Both of them were beheaded.

Altogether, the death penalty was imposed on 29 rebel leaders while 27 others, including Pilimathalawe, Ihagama, were banished from the country. Ihagama, once a bhikku, was the guiding force behind the rebellion that Keppettipola led.

The then British Deputy Inspector General of Hospitals in Sri Lanka Henry Marshall was sympathetic to Keppettipola and visited him in prison on several occasions. To Marshall (a Scotsman) Keppettipola was like the Scottish Freedom Fighter, Sir William Wallace, whom the English executed in 1306 for `treason' after he rebelled against King Edward I.

Marshall was so impressed by the Kandyan Chief's bravery and intellect that he took possession of the rebel leader's skull after the execution and presented it to the Phrenological Society of Edinburgh. Returned to Sri Lanka in 1955, the skull now rests in a monument in the Kandy esplanade. A statue of him stands on the Nuwara-Eliya-Badulla road backing the Uva hills where he fought for his motherland.

A very fair British historian, Marshall's believed that "had the insurrection been successful he would have been honoured and characterised as a patriot instead of being stigmatised and punished as a traitor."

To this day, tiny villages are found in the Uva Province - up in the mountains and deep down in the valleys. In these huts scattered in the most inaccessible areas live the descendants of the few survivors who escaped the wrath of British troops and hid in remote hamlets.

There were no international human rights organisations in that era to condemn British barbarism in Uva whereas today they are the very people - among others - who periodically pontificate on HR situations in Sri Lanka and elsewhere in the crisis-ridden Third World.

After the Uva rebellion was crushed the British Colonial Government embarked on a policy of appropriating on one pretext or another millions of acres of land belonging to peasants in the Kandyan provinces and sold them to British capitalists at the nominal price of one shilling per acre. There is no record of the number of Kandyan peasants rendered landless and homeless by this inhuman act perpetrated between 1833 and 1886.

Six years ago the Uva Provincial Council decided to explore the possibility of seeking compensation from the UK Government for the mindless destruction the British colonialists caused to Wellassa. The then Uva Chief Minister Samaraweera Weerawanni, UNP Parliamentarians W. J. M. Lokubandara (present Speaker) and Dharmadasa Banda were among those who mooted the idea. This occurred in the wake of World War II slave labour victims demanding compensation from German and Japanese companies although by then it was 55 years since the war had ended. The issue was almost the same in both cases (Uva and the world war), the only difference being the time factor.

In Sri Lanka's case however the objective was not really to expect compensation from the UK but to convey the message that we have not forgotten colonial misdeeds that continue to impact Sri Lankan society in varying degree.

The failure of the 1818 rebellion was the beginning of the end of Sri Lanka's dignity as a nation. As Justice Lawrie noted: "The descendants of the higher classes of the Kandyan times rapidly died out, the lower classes became ignorant and apathetic."

Today a considerable segment of Sri Lankan society has no sense of history, culture or national pride. And once again foreign powers and their proxies are dictating terms to us and telling us how to run our crisis-ridden country.