Aims and objectives
This 12-month pilot project will survey and digitise privately held records relating to caste, land ownership, and agricultural labour in Sri Lanka's Jaffna Peninsula, created prior to the island's independence in 1948. The survey seeks manuscript (paper and palm leaf) and printed material relating to the management and ownership of land, labour contracts, and agricultural records. Digitisation will commence with the manuscript collection of William Digby (1849–1904), a late-nineteenth century British author and political organizer who was a vociferous advocate for the reform of British policy in India and intervention in South Asian agrarian poverty.
Outcomes
Digitisation
EAP1450 completed digitization and bilingual (English and Tamil) metadata production for the Evelyn Rutnam Institute’s entire William Digby Collection. In total, 24,074 images were produced, divided over 232 files. The Evelyn Rutnam Institute’s William Digby Collection is arguably the single most important collection of primary sources available to understand Digby’s life and professional campaigns. From his vociferous advocacy for political reform in British India to his intervention and fundraising in response to the Southern India Famine of 1876-78, Digby leveraged the power of print media to issue a precocious critique of empire that deserves to be better understood.
Survey
In total, EAP1450’s survey conducted 129 meetings in more than 40 villages. The team spoke with 202 landowners and labourers, as well as representatives from multiple agriculture-related organizations including cooperative societies, training institutions, and government industry development organizations. Our efforts revealed a group of materials centered on the mid- to late-twentieth century, with concentrations in administrative materials associated with agricultural cooperatives and societies.
While our primary interest was the location and survey of unknown manuscript and print materials related to the management and ownership of land, labour contracts, and agricultural records, early on we determined that the family-held materials were largely being withheld from our team due to questions of trust. Given our team’s experience, these issues are not surprising—the most important materials located for EAP835 and EAP971 resulted from a multi-year relationship built over more than a dozen meetings. Due to this experience, we used the survey time to locate as many potential contributors as possible, interview them, and initiate a relationship upon which the Noolaham Foundation can continue to build.
Except for a handful of items, materials dated prior to 1948 were not located. Most labouring communities interviewed for this project explained that successive waves of displacement meant most families had lost everything, sometimes twice or three times. Some had lived in camps designed for internally displaced people, and all had struggled to protect family records (e.g., photographs, identity documents, school leaving certificates), let alone records connected to employment or livelihood. Institutional holdings generally contained print and manuscript materials dating from the 1950s and later, and some institutions reported having had their collections destroyed due to war-time shelling and displacement-related neglect.
In total, the survey located 1650 pages of manuscript and print material unavailable in international libraries and not found on WorldCat. Of that amount, only 479 pages were produced prior to the island’s independence, and thus fall within the scope of EAP1450.
The following Methodology Report was submitted as part of the project outputs:
