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Abstract
As the continued health of the plantation sector in Sri Lanka remains a vital part of the Sri Lankan economy, so too must the continued well-being of the people working and living in the estates remain an important concern. The tea industry must confront several challenges in the near future, some which have remained unaddressed for several decades and others that are only now becoming apparent. This paper analyses the current challenges and opportunities facing the people involved in the plantation economy in Sri Lanka – most specifically, the Up-country Tamils, who comprise most of the labour force. Arguably, the plantation system is an unethical economic scheme engendering a parallel political structure to reinforce the plantation economy. Despite some changes to the system during the nearly 200-year existence of plantation economics in Sri Lanka, transformative structural reform remains elusive, with the plantation sector dependent on a resident labour force that exercises limited power over both the economy in which they participate and the spaces they inhabit. This article thus focuses on the efforts of Up-country Tamils to challenge patterns of power and control in the plantation region and forge a new society within an increasingly authoritarian post-war state.
Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank his colleagues at the University of Peradeniya, the International Centre for Ethnic Studies in Kandy and Colombo, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, who all provided needed support and guidance throughout the creation and development of this manuscript.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
ORCID
Christopher Neubert http://orcid.org/0000-0003-1087-2825
Notes
1 Focus group participant, 16 February 2013. Hatton, Sri Lanka.
2 Additional interviews were conducted in Colombo and Kandy. All interviews and conversations recounted here took place between January and May 2013 and the names of most informants have been changed. All quotes used by informants in the paper are taken from direct transcriptions of the interview or conversation, either conducted by me in English or through a translator, and attempt to reproduce as accurately as possible the statement as it was delivered.
3 The local governing administration, the Pradeshiya Sabha is a common site of interaction between citizens and the government in (mostly Sinhala) villages and towns; much less so in the predominantly Tamil plantation regions.
4 Perhaps more troubling, the courts have enforced the estates right to the land in the case of the Up-country Tamil family, but not to the encroaching Sinhala population. Legally, the estate would be able to enforce its claims over the land in both instances, but the choice to do so in the case of the Up-country Tamil family and not in the case of the encroaching Sinhalese speaks to the continued efforts of Sinhala-dominated institutions in Sri Lanka to maintain their majoritarian authority (in this case enforced through biopower).
5 Historically, the kankani was the recruiter from the Tamil villages who led early migrants to Sri Lanka, where he then assumed a supervisory role. The kankani generally has a negative connotation among Up-country Tamils, having been responsible for a number of historical abuses. Today, the term generally refers to the Tamil supervisor of a group of workers.
6 The weighing of leaves has been a significant source of contention on the estates, and the RFWM has run several training programmes to teach women to read the scale, record the weight of their leaves and challenge the kankani if necessary (see also Daniel Citation1996). The RFWM has been organizing workers to combat this issue as well.
7 When referring to ‘villages' here, Thomas is referring generally to the Sinhala-majority towns and villages that exist within and around estate communities but are legally distinct and separate from the plantation communities and have their own local governmental organizations that operate within the framework of the state, whereas plantation communities located on the estates do not have governments with formal recognition by the state.
8 There are certainly other points, such as improving access to education, which are suggested here but not fully explored, that may also lead to the sort of radical reimagining of the up-country that could transform the livelihoods of the Tamils who live there.