The Ceylon Press History of Sri Lanka

The Land of Plenty

THE CEYLON PRESS HISTORY OF SRI LANKA BOOK 19. The Land of Plenty
Sri Lanka & The Gift That Gave
DAVID SWARBRICK
Published by The Ceylon Press, 2026
Copyright The Ceylon Press
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Copyright
2026 David Swarbrick
All rights reserved.
No portion of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher or author, except as permitted by U.S. copyright law.
This book is published by The Ceylon Press
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“Take some more tea,” the March Hare said to Alice, very earnestly.”
The Mad Hatter
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
Lewis Carroll 1865
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ONE
The Riches of Rice
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“If,” promised M.K. Gandhi, “you give me rice, I'll eat today; if you teach me how to grow rice, I'll eat every day.” Gandhi only visited Sri Lanka once – in 1927 – which may explain why, erudite though his aphorism was, it remained, all the same, a lesson that had already been learnt long ago on the island - thousands of years ago, in fact, in the very earliest days of recorded Lankan history.

Ever since the first distinctive water technology was introduced by the early Anduraupuran kings with the creation of the massive Panda Wewa reservoir around 450 BCE, their kings could provide an ever greater abundance of water, delivered just when and where it was needed. It was a proficiency that enabled an entire island to feed itself without trouble. Tummies full, its people could focus instead on the other great matters of life – religion, for example, war, politics, poetry – or the slow contemplation of a temple lotus pond during a long post-lunch siesta.

This particular pastime – or ones not dissimilar to it – is still greatly prized here today. Sophisticated water technology made the island’s paddy fields so fecund that the country barely needed to bother much with the enrichments of trade or the grubby task of making excessive money. As the ancient world’s merchant ships crossed the Indian Ocean from China to Arabia, they may have made a point of stopping in Sri Lanka to buy its gems, spices, Mannar pearls, elephants, and hardwoods - but the riches this all brought were just icing. The country was already rich.

And it was this richness that the last Lambakanna kings had on their side as the kingdom they ruled moved to its apogee. The great gilded last moments of Edwardian England were fuelled by cotton; the Ming by the porcelain trade; and ancient Athens, silver from the Laurion mines. But here it was rice – plentiful, abundant, nurturing rice.

Rice would have arrived with the island’s Mesolithic settlers, and it was first evidenced archaeologically around 800 BCE. Excavations made in the Anuradhapura area unearthed a remarkably large early Iron Age settlement – at least ten hectares, still with the spectral trace of irrigation systems and rice cultivation. The Mahavamsa Chronicle, starting a few hundred years later, around 540 BCE, noted that the island’s first recorded queen, Kuveni, showed rice to Prince Vijaya, the country’s founding paterfamilias. Vijaya’s hungry followers wasted little time, for the Chronicle goes on to document how they all then set about making themselves a fortifying lunch of rice and curry.

The plentiful supply of rice, even then, was due to small village tanks and their ability to harness and store water. They did so in systems that brought together up to 10 individual tanks within a small land basin measuring about 6 to 10 square miles, recycling water along the path from the reservoir to the field. Historians have estimated that in just one area in the north central part of the island – an area otherwise noted for its dryness – 450 such systems may have existed at some time between the second and the fifth centuries BCE, containing about 4,200 small tanks.

Ptolemy, writing in faraway Rome sometime between 127 and 170 CE, reported that the “country produces rice, honey, ginger, beryl, and hyacinth, and has mines of every sort, of gold, silver, and other metals. Large Tank systems followed the village ones – such as the Abhayavapi at Anuradhapura, the Tissa vava and the Nuwara vava. And from the fifth century CE onward, extremely long canals were added to the water network, opening up vast new areas for rice cultivation. By the sixth century, there was barely any suitable land in the entire Dryzone that had not been turned into paddy.

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TWO
Full Plates
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Of course, there were, from time to time, droughts, with at least six mentions of them cropping up in the ancient chronicles between 161 and 569 CE - but they seem to have been far less devastating here than in other parts of South Asia. The Samantapasadika, an ancient chronicle written by a monk called Buddhaghosa in Anuradhapura between 927 and 973 CE, notes the extreme care the state took to mitigate periods of water scarcity. “During the draught season,” it states, “when water becomes scarce, water is released in intervals. If someone does not receive his due share during the interval allocated to him and the crops become withered, then another should not receive his share during his allocation. If any monk drives water from a secondary canal to a field belonging to someone else, to a canal or a field belonging to him or to someone else, or covers the catchment, then he has committed the offence of avahara.”

The highly specific administrative and legal infrastructure that the state wrapped around water collection and extraction gave it an unparalleled ability to manage droughts – a capability other parts of South Asia lacked to anything like the same degree. One ancient chronicler remarked that “by attending facilities for the cultivation of fields by means of tanks, he (the king) dispelled the famine in prosperous Lanka.”

By the time the last of the Lambakarna kings came to rule in 691 CE, the country had been functioning as a recorded state for over 1,200 years. Rice had become the petrol of the nation. In this, Sri Lanka was little different to most other Asian countries – but what set it apart was its sheer abundance, its ability to power the kingdom so very effectively through good times and bad.

Indeed, when the last of the Lankbranaka fell in 993 CE and the country embarked on hundreds of years of uncertain life, even this did not bring rice production to its knees. To hold this almost folkloric expectation - this expectation that you will not entirely starve - was a rare assurance in those pre-modern times; and the patriotic confidence it engendered is tellingly evident, even today. Other things may be wrong, even very badly wrong, but, so the feeling goes, we will feed ourselves, we will go on, we will get better. As one Singhala idiom puts it: "rather than cursing the darkness, it is better to light a lamp."

Famine, scarcity, hardship – these are not conditions unfamiliar to Sri Lanka, then or now, but the island has largely escaped the widespread devastation that has gripped its neighbours, a theme that runs through its history from its earliest recorded times. North of Sri Lanka, uncountable millions died of famine in British colonial India - 36 famines in around 200 years. So appalling were they that people’s bodies actually evolved to store food as fat differently, so that their descendants now face significant health complications. Even before this period, famine routinely crippled the sub-continent. Over 1700 years from the 1st century CE, over 75 famines are recorded, with some, such as that in the Deccan in the 1630s, the Punjab in the mid-13th century and South India in the 11th century, being monumentally destructive. But not here.

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THREE
A Rainbow of Dreams
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"Flowers grow beneath her feet,” wrote Rani Manicka in her novel, “The Rice Mother,” “but she is not dead at all. The years have not diminished the Rice Mother. I see her, fierce and magical. Stop despairing and call to her, and you will see, she will come bearing a rainbow of dreams." In the simplest of algebraic formulas, advanced water technology enabled the plentiful production of rice, or, more directly, an innate island-wide self-confidence: however bad life sometimes got, it rarely if ever reached the draconian depths other countries encountered. Sri Lanka was different, and it was rice, the very thing it had most in common with all other Asian countries, which set it apart.

Rice still sits at the epicentre of all the island’s Buddhist services, at Pereheras, Yak and Bali ceremonies, distributed at every important occasion, not least its own bespoke festival, the Alutsal Or Alut Sal Mangal Yaya. This, the New Rice Festival, is the traditional agricultural thanksgiving ceremony that marks the harvest of the first crop of the Maha season, usually in January or February.

Today rice production accounts for some 20% of the country's land use – but despite producing between 2.5 and 3.5 million metric tons, the country still needs imports to meet the needs of its peckish citizens, who consume up to 120 kg annually in curries, kothu roti, lamprais, hoppers, sweet puddings – kiribath.

Although healthier red rice varieties command more favour in Sri Lanka than in most other countries, the island once supported over 2000 other strains. Heirloom varieties like Suwandel, Maa-Wee and the dark Kalu Heenati (considered something of an aphrodisiac) are now making a modest comeback.

Little in its preparation has changed since ancient times, and its cultivation, though improved by mechanisation and disease-resistant varieties, remains elaborate. The crop is planted in two seasons per year: the Maha (larger) season from September to March, fed by the northeast monsoon; and the Yala (smaller) season from May to August. The overall paddy track or Kumburuyaya is subdivided into smaller plots – liyadi - around which ridges (niyara) are made, pierced by vakkadas to let water in. Often, small areas are left wild to feed the birds that might otherwise simply eat the paddy. Harrowing or preparing the land, once done by ploughs and oxen, is now mechanised. The land is levelled and seeds, often pregerminated, sown across the watery track – the water itself is typically kept at around 5 cm above the soil. Then the weeding begins. And never stops: patience was ever a virtue best exhibited by rice farmers. Harvesting is usually a manual process, followed quickly by drying, storage, and milling, with rapid drying being the most critical step.

Entire social groups and agricultural occupations were organised around rice – including the Bathgama, an agricultural caste associated with rice production, their name deriving from Sinhala: Bath (rice) and Gama (village). Seen everywhere, rice is most iconically – albeit agreeably obscurely – best honoured in the battered stones that make up the little-known Kiribath Verhera. This now almost entirely ignored temple in Anduraupura was built as long ago as 267 BCE by Devanampiya Tissa, the king who brought Buddhism to Sri Lanka.

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FOUR
Kiribath
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Kiribath is, of course, the default national dish of the island, a dish that even those not blessed with domestic-goddess tendencies can easily master. Simply boil rice with coconut milk, water, and salt until all that's left is a thick ricey goo. Cooled and cut into any shape, it can be added to sturgeon eggs, bacon and eggs, white truffles, or dhal to give you a clearer idea of what the better gods consume when hungry. No dish better celebrates rice than this. No king, least of all the last of the Lambakannas, ate better. It remains a dish that leaves you feeling better off than ever before.

Destroyed, probably in 993 CE by Tamil invaders, the Kiribath Verhera was overtaken by jungle and only rediscovered in 1890. Like so much else on the vast plains of this devastated ancient city, there is nothing much to help you make sense of what you see. Writing in 1939, Hubert Weerasooriya, recorded how “another half mile of tramping through the jungle path brings us to a grass-covered mound similar in shape.” From studying the modest excavations made by the Archaeological Commissioner, he concluded that “it was one of the oldest of the larger dagabas completely built of brick, but unlike others, it has no stonework, such as flower altars or cornices. Another point it differed from similar structures was that its quadrangular courtyard was laid in brick and not paved in stone. “A shaft thirty-six feet deep was sunk through the centre of the dagaba. That it had been earlier stripped of its relics and other treasures it had contained by Tamil invaders was proved by the gutted relic chamber.”

“About 200 yards to the northeast of it,” he noted, “a few roughly cut stone pillars stand in bleak solitude, disclosing an image of a house in utter disrepair. Here it is to be seen: a piece of a giant statue of Buddha. The portion above the neck, which is in fair condition, measures about 2 feet, while the whole piece, which is only up to the waist, is about nine feet long. Now it is lying on its side, fallen from grace and badly damaged, a sad change from the lofty, exalted position the statue must have occupied in the time of Anuradhapura’s glory.’

Clearly, it once stood in the centre of a great garden. One of the inscriptions on the pillar, mentioned by the earlier explorer HCP Bell in 1891, records the granting of a garden notable for its protective tolerance toward criminals, who were explicitly safeguarded against arrest if they had gained sanctuary within its boundaries.

And up to the very point when Mahinda V, the last king of the Anuradhapura, last of the great Lambakannas, nibbled on his kiribath in his palace next door to the Kiribath Verhera sometime just before 993 CE, it must have seemed to many that this was a time of long drawn out sunsets, an era of India Summers whose ending was unimaginable - the ultimate glorious golden age of the one-island state, buoyed on a tide of surplus and achievement - its last great long moment when everything worked – until, one day, it didn’t.