Haputale

Haputale was a forested ridge on the edge of the Uva country before the British came, used as a boundary and a route between the hill kingdom and the southern plains rather than as a town. The Kandyan kingdom's southern frontier lay in these hills, and the area was caught up in the Uva–Wellassa rebellion of 1817–18, which British forces suppressed with great severity, burning homes and paddy and killing livestock across the district.

The town as it stands is a creation of the plantations. Coffee was planted on the surrounding slopes in the mid-19th century and destroyed by leaf disease after 1869, and tea replaced it. In 1890 Thomas Lipton, the Glasgow grocer, bought several estates in the district, among them Dambatenne, and built a factory there to process his own leaf for sale in his shops — one of the first attempts to run tea from bush to counter under a single name. Tamil labourers recruited from South India cleared the land and worked it, and their descendants still make up much of the population of the estates.

The railway arrived at the end of the 19th century as the line was pushed up from Nanu Oya towards Badulla, reaching Haputale in 1893 and Bandarawela the following year, and giving the estates a way to move tea to Colombo. The town grew along the ridge beside the station as a market and transfer point. Adisham, the stone house on the slope west of town, was built in 1931 by the British planter Sir Thomas Villiers and passed to the Benedictine order in the 1960s. After independence the estates were nationalised in the 1970s and later leased to private companies, and Haputale has since added a modest tourist trade to its work as an estate town.

Haputale's character comes from the meeting of two communities on one hillside. The town centre is largely Sinhalese and Muslim, with shops, eating houses and a mosque along the main street, while the estates that surround it are overwhelmingly Tamil, descended from the workers brought from South India in the 19th century. Tamil is heard on the estate roads, Sinhala in the shops, and both languages appear on signs. Hindu kovils stand among the tea, Buddhist temples above the town, and churches serve a Christian minority that includes the Benedictine community at Adisham.

The up-country Tamil community keeps its own calendar and customs: Thai Pongal in January, Deepavali later in the year, temple festivals on the estates, and a strong attachment to schooling as the route out of estate work. Their history is a difficult one — decades of statelessness after independence, poor housing in the old line rooms, and long campaigns over the daily wage — and it is part of the everyday conversation of the district.

Daily manners are those of rural Sri Lanka: modest dress, footwear removed at temples and in homes, and hospitality offered as a cup of sweet tea. The rhythm of the town is set by the estates and the trains. Work starts early, the buses and the first train fill before dawn, and by late afternoon cloud has usually risen from the plains and closed the long view that is the town's chief possession.

The town itself holds only a few thousand people, with a far larger population spread through the estate settlements and villages on the slopes around it. Tea is the economy. Pluckers, nearly all women, work the Dambatenne and neighbouring estates and are paid by weight, and the daily wage is a recurring political issue; men work in the factories, on maintenance and in transport. Market gardening adds a second income on the higher ground, with carrots, leeks, cabbage and beans trucked down to the wholesale markets.

Government service, schools, small shops and the bus and rail trades employ much of the town centre, and tourism is a growing but seasonal addition — guesthouses, drivers and guides for Lipton's Seat, the waterfalls and Horton Plains. Many families also depend on remittances from relatives working in Colombo or in the Gulf.

Housing is the district's clearest problem: many estate families still live in line rooms, terraces of single rooms dating from the plantation era, and replacement schemes have moved slowly. Landslides are a genuine risk in heavy rain, and the road and rail links along the ridge can be cut for days. Younger people leave for the cities, and the town's quiet streets fill again at the April new year when they return.

Everyday food in Haputale is rice and curry, built on what the hills produce. A plate comes with dhal, a vegetable or two — beans, leeks, carrot, potato, beetroot — a mallung of shredded greens with coconut, coconut sambol, and sometimes dried fish or an egg. The vegetables are the district's own, grown on the terraces above the town, and the cooking is plainer and less coconut-rich than on the coasts.

Tamil food is everywhere on the estate side of town. Thosai and string hoppers with sambar and coconut chutney, vadai fried in the afternoon, roti with dhal, and pittu, steamed cylinders of rice flour and coconut, are the staples of estate households and of the small kitchens near the bus stand. Bakeries sell short eats, fish buns and sweet rolls, and the tea kiosks that punctuate the main street pour strong milk tea all day.

Tea is also the town's product rather than just its drink. Uva is one of the island's main tea districts, alongside Nuwara Eliya and Dimbula, and the leaf grown on these slopes and processed at factories such as Dambatenne is sold as a regional style in its own right. Factory shops sell leaf by the packet, and buffalo curd with kithul treacle, sold in clay pots on roads down towards the lowlands, is the usual sweet.