This paper stems from ethnographic research that I conducted in the village of Kukulewa in 1983. In 1978 Kukulewa had been selected for development under the recently elected UNP government's Gam Udava (Village Awakening) program, and as I investigated the impact of this project (Brow 1988; 1990a; 1990b; 1992; 1996) I was struck by the prominence it afforded to images of the ancient ‘village community’. I was also impressed with the ways in which this imagery, despite the nationalist and anti-colonial thrust of the rhetoric in which it was embedded, drew on representations of the village community that had informed colonial projects of rural development a hundred years earlier. Subsequently I began to explore the varied sources and complex transformations of these images (Brow 1999), and the present paper is part of that endeavor. It focuses on the discourse of improvement employed in Sir William Gregory's plans to restore the irrigation works of the north central Dry Zone, after he became Governor of Ceylon in 1872. My aim is to trace some of the connections between (1) the ideologies of colonial rule that framed Gregory's project, (2) the ways in which the region and its inhabitants were represented in official discourse, and (3) the means that Gregory selected to achieve his goals.

The principal sources for the study are official records —correspondence between the Governor and the Colonial Office in London, legal enactments and other official publications, and reports that circulated among government servants in Ceylon.