NO. 61. — 1908.] RECENT WORK AMONG THE VEDDAS. 75 



sailing ship, partly square-rigged, which on appropriate 

 occasions was ceremonially hoisted to the top of a pole some 

 thirty feet tall, and in this and another village Kapalpe or 

 Kabalbe, i.e., " ship-spirit," was given as the name of the most 

 powerful spirit they propitiate. 



The Village Veddas form a class which it is most difficult to 

 briefly, yet fairly, describe. The term must not be taken to 

 apply to degenerate Veddas who have lost their jungle charac- 

 teristics and independent habits under Sinhalese encroach- 

 ment. Doubtless, many such folk do live as Sinhalese in 

 chena settlements for a short time before their extinction in 

 the surrounding mass of peasant Sinhalese. But this is not 

 the sense in which the Sinhalese apply the term Gam-Veddo 

 (Village Veddas), nor is it the sense in which I use the term. 

 Knox speaks of " wild " and 'Ltame " Veddas, and to come 

 to more recent times, there is evidence that a hundred years 

 ago there were organized communities of house-building 

 Veddas, while certain Veddas received grants of land from the 

 Sinhalese kings, and on these lived as definite village com- 

 munities, until quite recent times, probably till within the last 

 half century. The present community of Dambani, in the 

 jungle between Kallodi and Alutnuwara, may serve as an 

 example of a village Vedda community. Some twenty families 

 living in tolerably built houses keep buffaloes and cultivate 

 chenas, the latter being big enough to supply, not only their 

 own wants, but to permit of a lively traffic with Sinhalese tra- 

 ders. These Dambani folk have been known to the Arachchi of 

 Beligala as a flourishing community, in the same social condi- 

 tion, for the last thirty years, and he states that they were in 

 this condition in his father's time. The Dambani folk are 

 unfortunately " show " Veddas, that is to say, people who 

 have been sent for so often by white visitors that they have 

 learnt certain tricks, which they show off directly they see a 

 white person, and so constantly demand presents that serious 

 work with them is an impossibility. Nevertheless, a short 

 visit was sufficient to show that here was a community which, 

 though it had lost many Vedda beliefs, still retained others, 

 and was sufficiently strong and independent for there to be 

 no likelihood of its immediate fusion with the surrounding 



