[{"data":1,"prerenderedAt":244},["ShallowReactive",2],{"story-en-berava-caste-and-the-drum":3},{"id":4,"title":5,"body":6,"category":219,"description":220,"era":221,"extension":222,"featured":223,"heroImage":224,"imageCredit":225,"imageLicense":226,"imageSource":227,"meta":228,"navigation":223,"path":229,"rawYear":230,"seo":231,"sources":232,"stem":242,"translated":223,"url":235,"__hash__":243},"storiesEn\u002Fen\u002Fstories\u002Fberava-caste-and-the-drum.md","The Caste That Owned the Drum and Was Despised for It",{"type":7,"value":8,"toc":209},"minimark",[9,18,21,24,29,36,39,50,57,64,71,75,78,89,96,115,119,122,129,136,140,143,146,149,152,155,165,168,172,175,178,198,202],[10,11,12,13,17],"p",{},"In 1979, in the villages of the Nilwala valley north of Galle, a young British anthropologist called Bob Simpson kept noticing a piece of furniture. When a Berava man visited the house of a Goyigama family, a chair would appear from somewhere. It was not a normal chair. It had been cut down, and it is called ",[14,15,16],"em",{},"putuva bāgaya"," — the half chair. Everyone else sat at full height. The visitor sat head and shoulders below them.",[10,19,20],{},"This was, by local standards, progress. An older generation had simply had to stand.",[10,22,23],{},"Simpson's Berava hosts were among the most skilled people in the district. Between them they could drum, dance, cast horoscopes, carve and paint masks, build ritual structures out of split coconut fronds, model deities and demons out of mud, and make statues for Buddhist temples. In ola-leaf books guarded within families they held the verse and incantation that made it possible to conduct the ceremonies by which ordinary Sinhala households dealt with illness, misfortune and death. Almost nothing important in the village could happen without them. And they were near the bottom of the social order, which is what this article is about.",[25,26,28],"h2",{"id":27},"indispensable-and-unclean","Indispensable and unclean",[10,30,31,32,35],{},"The Sinhala caste system is not the Indian one. There are no Brahmin or Kshatriya castes; the highest-ranked caste, the Goyigama or cultivators, is also the largest; ideas of purity and pollution are less rigid. What it does have is an unusually tight link between caste and occupation, because it grew out of a system of feudal service tenures — ",[14,33,34],{},"rājakāriya",", duty to the king — organised around royal courts and Buddhist temples.",[10,37,38],{},"Below the Goyigama sit the service castes: metalworkers, lime burners, palanquin bearers, potters, washermen, jaggery makers — and the Berava, the drummers. Their marginality was enforced by specific rules. They frequently held no hereditary land title. They had to use caste-specific family and personal names. They owed unavoidable service to higher-status groups, and what they could wear was restricted. How many people this touches is deliberately hard to establish, since caste has not been recorded in a census since 1911; one estimate puts the share of Sri Lankans subject to caste discrimination at 20 to 30 per cent. The Berava are among the lowest-ranked service castes and among the most numerous.",[10,40,41,42,45,46,49],{},"Two justifications for their rank are offered by non-Berava people, and they are worth stating exactly. The first is that a drummer handles the skins of dead animals; killing is abhorred in mainstream Buddhism, and by extension so is touching its product. The second is that ritual work brings drummers into routine contact with demons and spirits — ",[14,43,44],{},"yaksha"," and ",[14,47,48],{},"bhūta"," — at the bottom of the Buddhist cosmic order.",[10,51,52,53,56],{},"In the words of Simpson and Premakumara de Silva, whose 2025 paper in the journal ",[14,54,55],{},"CASTE"," draws together two decades of southern fieldwork: \"the drum, the essential symbol of their oppression, figures in almost all ritual that takes place in Sri Lankan society. Without the drum there can be no ritual or ceremony.\"",[10,58,59,60,63],{},"The contradiction was visible in public. At a ",[14,61,62],{},"perahera",", drummers and dancers go in front of the sacred regalia and in front of the lay authorities — and, as the anthropologist Seneviratne observed in 1978, the act of dancing before someone places the dancer low and the recipient high. Along much of the route they also walk backwards, so as not to turn their backs on a high-status person. The honour and the humiliation are the same gesture.",[10,65,66,67,70],{},"Nor was the hierarchy only external. Berava who did funeral drumming — ",[14,68,69],{},"mala bera"," — did not inherit land and were treated as inferior within the caste; a ritual drummer would never take funeral work. To outsiders the distinction meant nothing. All Berava were low.",[25,72,74],{"id":73},"what-the-caste-actually-held","What the caste actually held",[10,76,77],{},"This was not a caste of hired musicians. What the Berava held was closer to intellectual property, and they managed it as such.",[10,79,80,81,84,85,88],{},"Knowledge was sorted into two classes. ",[14,82,83],{},"Pita pantiya",", the outer class, was public; by the 1980s a Nugegoda publisher had printed much of the oral repertoire in book form. Berava ritualists accepted those books as legitimate and considered them useless. Only ",[14,86,87],{},"aetul pantiya"," — inner knowledge, passed from a named teacher to a pupil — was thought to make a ritual work.",[10,90,91,92,95],{},"Access ran through kinship, characteristically from uncle to nephew, ",[14,93,94],{},"māma-baena",". A woman married out to her husband's village and her children came back to her natal village to train with her brother, so marriage alliances between performing families were also apprenticeship arrangements. Simpson and de Silva put the consequence sharply: if men were the warp of tradition, women were its weft. The women were not practitioners, and the system could not have reproduced itself without them.",[10,97,98,99,102,103,106,107,110,111,114],{},"Members of the caste also had their own account of who they were. Rather than ",[14,100,101],{},"Berava",", which names the drum, many preferred ",[14,104,105],{},"Nekati Kulaya",", which names astrology. In 1979 a drummer named Arlis Gurunnanse of Walawe recited to Simpson a poem he said had been in his family for generations, claiming descent from Brahmins. This is less eccentric than it sounds: the Sinhala word for drum, ",[14,108,109],{},"bera",", is closely related to the Tamil ",[14,112,113],{},"parai",", and the Berava resemble the Tamil drummer caste, the Paraiyar. Gananath Obeyesekere has noted in passing that early Brahmin migrants \"might have descended the caste ladder\" and may have links with drummers.",[25,116,118],{"id":117},"what-the-discrimination-looked-like","What the discrimination looked like",[10,120,121],{},"By 1979 the worst was past, and had been fought for. The struggle over the right of Berava men and children to cover the upper body in public has a name, the \"Battle of the Banian\", and accounts differ on when it happened: Bryce Ryan reports a violent confrontation near Tangalle in 1949, while Simpson's informants described similar events in the 1960s, triggered again by a Berava child being assaulted in the street for going to school in a vest, and said that S. A. Wickremasinghe, then Communist Party MP for Akuressa, physically intervened. Probably both are true.",[10,123,124,125,128],{},"What remained was quieter and constant. Marriage outside the caste was prohibited in practice, and rules governed who could sit at a table together. Simpson, out in public with Berava friends, was asked whether he did not realise these people were low and dirty — ",[14,126,127],{},"kilutuyi",". Around Bentara, de Silva found hostility from other castes driving Berava children out of school early, so the community founded its own primary school; they also had to build their own temple, because high castes controlled the village one.",[10,130,131,132,135],{},"And yet when misfortune struck, those same families came to a Berava ritualist's house, drank his tea and were scrupulously polite; when a healing ceremony — ",[14,133,134],{},"tovil"," — was held, the troupe was fed and welcomed. Simpson and de Silva give a cold-eyed explanation: a man who can repel misfortune can cause it, and Berava knowledge of sorcery made them worth not offending.",[25,137,139],{"id":138},"nationalised","Nationalised",[10,141,142],{},"The twentieth century took this knowledge and made it a national possession without making its owners national heroes.",[10,144,145],{},"The hinge was S. W. R. D. Bandaranaike's election in 1956 and the promise of reviving a Sinhala culture said to have atrophied under colonial rule; a Ministry of Cultural Affairs was created that year. Susan Reed has documented how Kandyan dance became entangled with that political project, and the scholar Mantillake identifies the Berava dancer and drummer Pani Bharata as the man who built an entire repertoire of dances celebrating village life for it — dances presented as authentic and pre-colonial that were, Mantillake argues, largely invented after independence.",[10,147,148],{},"The apparatus that followed did the real damage. Dance entered the school curriculum in the 1950s and eventually ran to Ordinary Level, Advanced Level and degree study. Textbooks, manuals and examinations replaced variable local traditions with prescribed ones. Reed's conclusion is that Berava performers were gradually squeezed out of their own ritual inheritance in favour of high-caste exponents.",[10,150,151],{},"The mechanism is almost absurd. When the state moved to institutionalise traditional performance in 1978, it found that the people who could actually teach dance had no higher qualifications and mostly had not finished O-levels. The Ministry of Education's solution was to award them master's degrees and employ them as university lecturers. Those first appointments went to initiated Berava dancers and drummers, mostly from the up-country tradition; low-country performers waited much longer.",[10,153,154],{},"But once entry ran through examinations rather than apprenticeship, higher-caste candidates, better placed for an academic approach, came to dominate the field. Berava protests that they were being dispossessed of the intellectual property of their birthright produced one concession: on 1 May 1974 the Institute of Aesthetic Studies admitted ten Berava students on a practical test. It was contentious, it lasted a year, and then everyone was recruited on formal qualifications alone.",[10,156,157,158,45,161,164],{},"Reed's terms for the result are ",[14,159,160],{},"classicization",[14,162,163],{},"rationalization",": practices \"once regarded solely as the province of low-caste Berava males became respectable within the context of Sinhala nationalism.\" The negative associations were not refuted. They were lifted off the practice and left attached to the people.",[10,166,167],{},"Recognition came from the top. The Kala Bhushana award was instituted in the mid-1980s and first given on 22 May 1984 at President J. R. Jayewardene's residence, where 53 temple artists, drummers, dancers and astrologers were honoured — on National Heroes Day. Simpson's Berava associates were proud of it, and relaxed about recipients being only distant relatives; what mattered was that they were Berava.",[25,169,171],{"id":170},"where-it-left-them","Where it left them",[10,173,174],{},"Two forces pull now, and both lead away from the village. One is the market: since the 1980s the south-western coast has sold ritual to tourism — short \"authentic\" episodes for visitors, at better fees than ritual service pays, and masks carved for walls rather than for use, with non-Berava and non-Sri Lankans performing the episodes too. The other is escape. For most Berava men of recent generations, doing their fathers' work meant reproducing a caste identity they had reason to shed, often changing a family name whose full form revealed drumming or astrology. The destinations were the armed forces during the thirty-year war, garment factories, domestic work in the Gulf and low-paid security jobs — which, as the researcher Jabbar observes, is caste reproducing itself inside a modern occupational hierarchy rather than dissolving. There are exceptions: returning in 2003, Simpson met the son of an important ritualist family who had qualified as a doctor.",[10,176,177],{},"The plainest statement of where this leaves the music is the drummer and scholar Sumuditha Suraweera's, in his 2009 doctoral thesis: \"The traditional music of Sri Lanka is perceived to be a national heritage. In reality, the music and its musicians are a marginalized sector of society.\"",[10,179,180,181,183,184,45,186,189,190,193,194,197],{},"None of which alters the underlying fact. Dance cannot be performed without drumming. Temple ritual, ",[14,182,62],{},", ",[14,185,134],{},[14,187,188],{},"bali"," all require the offering of sound, ",[14,191,192],{},"śabda pūjā",", and the auspicious drumming, ",[14,195,196],{},"magul bera",", that opens a ceremony. Every claim made anywhere about Sri Lankan performance as national heritage rests on a body of knowledge that one despised caste kept alive, at cost, for as long as anyone can trace.",[25,199,201],{"id":200},"what-we-know-and-how-we-know-it","What we know, and how we know it",[10,203,204,205,208],{},"The core of this article is Bob Simpson and Premakumara de Silva's peer-reviewed 2025 paper in ",[14,206,207],{},"CASTE: A Global Journal on Social Exclusion",", built on Simpson's fieldwork in the Nilwala valley in 1979–80 and de Silva's around Bentara in the mid-1990s, together with Sumuditha Suraweera's 2009 Canterbury thesis and the work of Susan Reed, Bryce Ryan, Seneviratne and Gananath Obeyesekere that they draw on. Where accounts genuinely differ — most clearly on the date of the \"Battle of the Banian\", given by Ryan as 1949 near Tangalle and by Simpson's informants as the 1960s — both versions are given here rather than one. Two things remain uncertain: the size of the caste, since caste has not been counted in a census since 1911, and its origins, where descent from Brahmin migrants is a claim made by members of the caste and treated by scholars as suggestive rather than established. The English Wikipedia article on the Berava is flagged by its own editors as disputed and is not relied on here beyond the etymology of the word.",{"title":210,"searchDepth":211,"depth":211,"links":212},"",2,[213,214,215,216,217,218],{"id":27,"depth":211,"text":28},{"id":73,"depth":211,"text":74},{"id":117,"depth":211,"text":118},{"id":138,"depth":211,"text":139},{"id":170,"depth":211,"text":171},{"id":200,"depth":211,"text":201},"controversy","No Sri Lankan ritual can happen without a drum, and for centuries almost every drummer came from one caste that was held in contempt for playing it. Then the knowledge was nationalised.","Pre-colonial-present","md",true,"\u002Fimages\u002Fstories\u002Fberava-caste-and-the-drum.webp","Charles T. Scowen & Co., Ceylon — albumen print captioned 'Sinhalese Devil Dancers', c. 1870-1890, with the drummer seated at right (Rijksmuseum)","CC0 \u002F Public domain","https:\u002F\u002Fcommons.wikimedia.org\u002Fwiki\u002FFile:Vier_Singalese_devil_dansers_in_een_rituele_Sri_Lankese_dans,_begeleid_door_een_trommelaar_Sinhalese_Devil_Dancers_(titel_op_object),_RP-F-F80087.jpg",{},"\u002Fen\u002Fstories\u002Fberava-caste-and-the-drum",1979,{"title":5,"description":220},[233,236,239],{"title":234,"url":235},"Bob Simpson and Premakumara de Silva, 'Cultural Ambivalence: A Socio-Historical Account of the Berava Caste of Southern Sri Lanka' — CASTE: A Global Journal on Social Exclusion 6(1), April 2025","https:\u002F\u002Fjournals.library.brandeis.edu\u002Findex.php\u002Fcaste\u002Farticle\u002Fdownload\u002F2494\u002F1978",{"title":237,"url":238},"Sumuditha Suraweera, 'Sri Lankan, Low-Country, Ritual Drumming: The Raigama Tradition' — PhD thesis, University of Canterbury, 2009","https:\u002F\u002Fir.canterbury.ac.nz\u002Fbitstream\u002F10092\u002F3440\u002F1\u002FThesis_fulltext.pdf",{"title":240,"url":241},"Berava (caste) — Wikipedia","https:\u002F\u002Fen.wikipedia.org\u002Fwiki\u002FBerava_(caste)","en\u002Fstories\u002Fberava-caste-and-the-drum","OiTmuvgTJPvPTL4Vb2aPv9KuxwQzybUA0zULQrhvccY",1787999337574]