27 November 2019 01:30 am Views - 433
The Portuguese did not try to change these practices. They merely renamed those who held land by military service (hewayo) as lascorins. Over time, the Portuguese came to heavily rely on these recruits, though at times they exploited them to a point where defections became widespread and common, such as at Randiwela in 1630, resulting in severe depletions: at the end of the Portuguese rule, the lascorin force had reduced to a paltry 4,700. They had initially been led by Sinhala noblemen in the KotteKingdom, but as time went by they were replaced by Portuguese officials who got the best lands. This sealed the fate of not only lascorins, but also of Portuguese rule in general: as records indicate, the soldiers took time to adjust to their new overseers and this served to alienate them from the administration.
Until the 15th century, pistols, muskets, rockets and cannon power were virtually unknown and unheard of, but once soldiers learnt how to operate them, they were able to manoeuvre them nimbly
The Portuguese did not make a specific distinction between civil and military administration. This was why the Captain-General happened to be a civil as well as a military officer. No doubt that gave a misleading view of the finances in the island, but more importantly it had the effect of militarising the whole administration. Moreover, soldiers viewed their salaries with indifference; according to Abeyasinghe, “what was important was the percalco or the perquisites of an office.” If they were not quite above making clandestine profits, it was because officials from that era considered private profiteering to be perfectly legitimate, even for those serving in the military. In any case, the pay and privileges to which soldiers were entitled were inadequate; the captains, for instance, earned only 180 xeraphins. These salaries had to be, and often were, supplemented by lucrative profits. Sources tell us just what these profits amounted to over a period of three years: 25,000 pardaos for the Captain in Colombo, 15,000 pardaos for the Captain in Galle, and 4,000 pardaos for the Factor. Later, the Dutch introduced two innovations to the military: they created a stud in the island of Delft, which would later became the country’s first mounted force, and they brought in and settled large numbers of Malay exiles, slaves, convicts, and soldiers. The Portuguese did not try to raise a cavalry because the idea of mounted warfare, or even riding on horses, was alien to most locals: “the native Sinhalese made little use of them and in the mountain kingdom of Kandy only the king was permitted to ride one.” We are told that European style cavalry probably made its first appearance in 1764, during the governorship of Van Eck, and that the Dutch did much to improve the lot of horses on Delft, which incidentally had been brought there by their predecessors; later when the British took over the island, the stud was placed under the 73rd regiment led by Lieutenant-Colonel Barbut. The most significant innovation of the Dutch, of course, was the settlement of the Malays. Broadly, there were two kinds of Malay settlers: political exiles from Indonesia (referred to as “Staatsbannelingen” in official documents) and other deportees. The Batavian Government saw it fit to banish Javanese princes who had tried to raise arms against them, along with their wives, siblings, and children, to Sri Lanka. The Dutch Council in Ceylon moreover stipulated in 1747 that such exiles had to be accompanied by soldiers. This, together with the fact that most other Malay settlers happened to be soldiers, ensured a steady stream of recruits whose loyalty to their overseers could be guaranteed, at least at the beginning.
The Dutch, for their part, ensured their loyalty by housing them near the Colombo Fort in Hulftsdorp. We are told that the Dutch had “little to fear from the exiles,” but in later years we hear of soldiers defecting to Kandy because of onerous living conditions. In any case their prowess was noted before the Dutch conquest: in 1640, Malay troops accompanied Admiral Coster in his storming of Galle, and they were present at the siege of Colombo 15 years later and at the capture of Mannar and Jaffna three further years later. Unofficial sources put the number of Malay soldiers at the end of Dutch rule (1795) at roughly 1,400 including 880 in Colombo, 373 in Trincomalee and 133 in Batticaloa. Until the end they served their masters well: in 1796, they attacked Trincomalee, Barberyn, and Mutwal. When Holland conceded the island to Great Britain, however, the latter did not exact revenge on the Malays. On the contrary, their expertise won over the British administration to such an extent that on the orders of Frederick North a regiment of Malay soldiers was formed, which was transferred to the king’s service in 1801 and turned into the 1st Ceylon Regiment in 1802. Indeed, North’s instructions “not by any means to disgrace or to proscribe the Malays” attested to how eager and willing the new administration was to make use of them. By 1800, the number of Malay soldiers stood at around 1,000 while the Malay Corps stood on the strength of 20 European officers; Major General MacDowell was assigned the task of raising this contingent to a “respectable establishment” later on. In the meantime the lascorins were taken in as well, though only as an additional contingent: the Colombo Native Militia formed in 1818 and the Armed Lascorins Corps formed in 1819 were duly recognised, yet never with the same kind of esteem that the other regiments were.
The euphoria over these regiments and corps was short-lived, however; during the term of Robert Wilmot-Horton, when utilitarianism had spread its wings in England and cost-cutting had become the order of the day, the strength of the dragoons was reduced to 32 officials, that of lascorins by two-thirds its former establishment (with the Armed Corps disbanded on General Orders from December 1835), and that of the Malays from 48 in 1829 to a paltry five in 1835. The numbers would pick up again, especially with the opening up of the plantation economy and the need to secure its interests, but only through the formation of new regiments and, half a century later, a volunteer unit at Royal College: the latter of which added a cadet force to what had until then been a mostly regular army hired from abroad.