The Anuradhapura Kingdom - X

The Anuradhapura Kingdom - X

Contiued with part nine   here to go previous one

Nor did the state retain ownership of all the major irrigation works constructed under its direction. Dhatusena ceded half the income of the Kalavava to his brother. The long Alahara canal was granted to a monastery not long after its construction. Monasteries, indeed, often had the resources to maintain irrigation works in their charge or control in good repair. Immunity grants of the Anuradhapura period record the transfer to the monasteries of the control of sections of the population together with the right to exact taxes and core labor from them; apart from these fiscal rights, administrative and judicial powers traditionally enjoyed by the King were also delegated to them by such grants. Similar immunities came to be enjoyed by the ruling gentry who claimed proprietary rights over some irrigation works and land.

Lists of officials which occur in inscriptions of the ninth and tenth centuries, when the irrigation network of Sri Lanka was most extensive and highly developed, have been cited as evidence of the existence of a hydraulic bureaucracy. Quite clearly the services of men with a high degree of technical skill were necessary for the construction of large and complex irrigation works, for their maintenance in good repair, and for the regulation of irrigation water to fields. But this is not conclusive evidence of an irrigation bureaucracy on the Wittfogelian model, of a phalanx of technically competent officials who formed the key ingredient in an authoritarian political structure in which power was concentrated in the king and his bureaucracy. On the contrary, hydraulic society as it developed in Sri Lanka was not a centralized despotism, rigidly authoritarian and highly bureaucratic, but had many of the attributes of a feudal society, with power devolving on monastic institutions and the gentry.

The more important state-sponsored irrigation works boosted the island's agricultural economy by enabling the extension of the area under cultivation and habitation and facilitating more intensive exploitation of agricultural resources without upsetting the balance between land and population. Instead of a single annual crop, large-scale irrigation works ensured the production of two or three crops a year, and the resulting agricultural surplus was adequate to maintain a large section of the population not engaged in food production and to sustain a vibrant and dynamic civilization. It provides an effective demolition of yet another of the key features of Wittfogelian theory stasis as a characteristic of hydraulic civilization.

We need to end this brief survey of Sri Lanka's hydraulic civilization on a more somber note. Irrigation civilizations by their very nature are critically vulnerable to natural disaster and foreign invaders. For such a society is like a complex machine with an extraordinarily delicate mechanism. It could function with amazing efficiency but just as easily break down if maintenance were neglected or as the result of some seemingly manageable damage to the mechanism. With increasing complexity, inertia and negligence could be as insidiously detrimental to its smooth functioning as the more palpable threats from the natural disaster or foreign invasion.

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