Our need is ruralisation not urbanisation

From the Gama Neguma concept:

S. Pathiravitana

“From Minneri (Minneriya) we went to Kowdelly Tank (Kaudella)...It is impossible to imagine anything wilder than the scenery. Herons and Bitterns, sat like statues, on their accustomed perches, as our cavalcade passed, so unaccustomed were they to see, or fear man.

The tank still retains water in many parts; and the magnificence of the vegetation denote a soil, said to be the best in Ceylon for the growth of rice and cotton....” This was Sir Henry Ward, Governor of Ceylon, experiencing for himself at first hand the state of the country he was invited to rule around 1853.

Heritage

Few Governors before him had done these visits and still less to condemn previous administrations that “never devoted a fair proportion of the revenue towards the restoration of the old works...the one thing that comes home to every Sinhalese is the improvement of those means of irrigations which the climate rendered indispensable.”

At least there was one Sinhalese in all those subsequent years who felt as keenly as Governor Ward imagined, who took it upon himself to make it his life-long interest in the ‘restoration of the old works.’

And that was D.S. Senanayaka. But, he himself realised the indifference of the Sinhalese to their heritage. While commending Ward for declaring an irrigational policy for the country and for his concern over Sinhalese aspirations, but noting Sinhala apathy, DS went on to say: “In these modern days of mighty Empire-States, the achievements of little peoples are apt to receive but scant attention.

The peoples themselves adopt a defeatist attitude as if they were capable of no great achievement. Yet a knowledge of the stupendous monuments of our past greatness should surely prove a sound corrective.”

What boggles the minds of visitors when they see our ‘stupendous monuments’ is the labour involved in producing these monumental works. One English engineer who lived in this country in the 19th century worked out that to build a bund of 17 million cubic yards, “at ordinary rates of labour in this country must have cost œ1, 300,000, a sum which would be sufficient to form an English railway 120 miles long.”

And this, for a single embankment. A tank needs several and sometimes they stretch out to a length of nine miles. And this is not done by slave-driving either, says DS, “but was rendered under an organised system of determined co-operative effort for the common good.”

DS is recalling all these achievements in the foreword he wrote to Brohier’s labour of love, the three-part study of Ancient Irrigation Works in Ceylon.

Lessons

Then drawing our attention to the admiration of modern visiting engineers of the skill of our own unknown engineers of the past, he refers to how some modern experts who detected ‘flaws’ in the engineering skills of the ancients were later found to be not really ‘flaws’ but that the ‘flaws’ were due to their inability to comprehend the techniques used by the Sinhala engineers.

And when we realise, he says, “that our decline was due to causes which ‘wasted the organisations on which the fabric of society rested and interfered with the system of obtaining the combined labour of the whole community’; when and if, we remember these things, and learn from the lessons of the past, we surely need not despair of our future.”

All this repetition by me is by way of a preamble to a great step taken by our Government to restore the thousands of neglected village tanks which once upon a time sustained this country without our kings having to be in debt to the IMF and the World Bank.

But what is the use of restoring tanks when there is no water? asked the Cassandra-like voice of one of our economic experts.

True, a tank is useless without water. But our people did not despair. They got the brilliant idea of storing water when it rained profusely so that the conserved water could be useful in the rainless months that followed.

Unlike our urban types they were observant of the way Nature behaved. A rain follows drought and a drought follows rain - more or less. This is the eternal law. Unlike economists, the peasants knew how to get themselves adjust to the vagaries of Nature and the rhythms of the universe.

The engineering skills and genius of the Sinhalese arose, as H.Parker, an irrigation engineer himself notes, from their experience of building village tanks which were as small as three acres and as large as hundred acres.

But the idea of storing water for paddy cultivation never occurred to some rice farmers he had met in Gambia. There must surely have been economic experts over there to advise them. For, “they had never heard of such a practice, and had no notion of the manner in which such works could be constructed, even on the smallest scale.”

Irrigation

Even in the country where the irrigation system is supposed to have begun - Mesopotamia, the water was drawn into the fields of cultivation by tapping the rivers by means of channels.

According to Parker, the building of huge reservoirs was an idea that was developed in this country after their experience of constructing village tanks. The measured release of waters for cultivation purposes through the biso-kotuwas from these giant tanks was another unique technical achievement of the Sinhala engineers.

We were so clever at this, and our fame had spread to neighbouring India so much that Jayapida, a king of Kashmir, the Rajatarangani says, requested the king of Ceylon to send a team of Rakshasas to build a reservoir.

About the biso-kotuwa, Parker gives its literal meaning as ‘Queen’s enclosure.’ But he also suspects that it “would be more correctly termed bisi-kotuwa where (the water level) lowers.” And he is right, but the derivation is more likely from the term bas.- basau - bisau - biso.

Parker also states that, a Mr Powell had found ‘the brick work (at the well of the biso-kouwa) was of such excellent quality that he could not avoid regretting that he had been instructed to pull it down.’

The renovations of these village tanks, and there are so many of them in the old Province of Ruhuna, that if they are renovating them there will be no need to build huge dams and tanks at enormous costs to reserve the waters as it happened in the South of our country.

One has only to look at the one-inch map of Timbolketiya, included in Brohier’s book, to see thousands of little tanks blooming like little flowers in a huge meadow. Brohier puts it differently, “Apparently, long before the large tank was built, the system of water storage was confined to chains of little tanks. This Topo sheet affords the most picturesque example of an irrigation scheme of greatest antiquity.”

Save the country

My only hope is that the Gama Neguma programme just begun, will eventually lead to a rejuvenation of village life. We need it badly to save this country and its culture. The tanks must be followed by the dagobas, for these two, interweaving as they did in the past, may lead to that way of life which has made the inhabitants of this country a smiling, cheerful and a happy people as we were famed to be.

Let us hope that this will also bring back our mothers and sisters who, to our great shame and disgrace, have been allowed to slave in the Middle East. Their presence here will enable family life in our villages to blossom once more, for the lack of which there has been so much social decay.

If we are to make living in this country peaceful and pleasant, it is not more urbanisation but more ruralisation that can do it. Sadly enough our misguided politicians have tried to bring the city to the country when the country should have been kept sacrosanct and away from the disastrous influence of the city.

Final place

Here’s a thought they should take into consideration. In his book Alternative to Death, the Earl of Portsmouth recounts the experiment of a scientist, McCarrison, with rats.

He found that “rats fed on an equivalent diet of our city dwellers grew diseased, nervous, treacherous, quarrelsome and cannibalistic, but that similar rats fed on the fresher, whole, simple diet of some Indian hill tribes, were fertile, gentle and healthy, he thumbed a long nose at the last two centuries of ‘progress.’

His experiment diagnosed one root cause rather than the symptoms of a sick world. Fresh food from well-tilled land is the basis of physical health, for earth is the matrix and the grave of our physical existence...thus, if we neglect the matrix, the grave alone remains the ‘fine and private (final) place.”

The title of his book followed from McCarrrison’s discovery and that leaves us with the thought that the history of civilisation is the history of the soil. He thinks that the whole white civilisation is now standing at the gateway of death and he ends with this warning: “In any civilisation there comes a moment, when, if it is to continue, civilisation must become ruralisation. All its economics, all its amenities, its armies and its splendour depend on one thing: the reverent use of its soil. The writing on the wall is there: we are being weighed in the balance and found wanting - in ruralisation.”