A place on the plantations: Up -country Tamil ethnicity in Sri Lanka.

Abstract

From the 1830s until the 1930s, millions of Indians migrated to work on plantations throughout the British empire, producing a massive diaspora in Asia, Africa and the Caribbean. This dissertation analyzes the historical development of a distinct ethnic identity among Tamil tea plantation workers in the central highlands, or up-country, of Sri Lanka. These extremely vulnerable and marginalized plantation workers have become Sri Lankan, and I explore what being Sri Lankan means to them. A new ethnic identification as Up-country Tamil has developed in the contexts of ongoing ethnic discrimination, harassment and violence, from their loss of citizenship in the 1940s and 50s, to the repatriation of one-third of the community to India in the 60s and 70s, to the outbreak of ethnic civil war in the 80s and 90s. Up-country Tamils have developed a place-based sense of ethnic identity, since official, institutional avenues of acceptance and citizenship had been denied to them for decades. This dissertation focuses on how various culture workers, including NGO workers, politicians and plantation union officials, fostered this process of ethnogenesis. This diaspora next door to their ancestral homeland has thus acquired a normalized, but still tenuous, position in the modern Sri Lankan nation-state. This emergent identity therefore complicates hegemonic binary views of ethnicity in Sri Lanka as a simple Sinhala-Tamil divide by revealing the historically hybrid character of ethnicity in Sri Lanka. Based on over one year of ethnographic research in Sri Lanka and India, this dissertation places Up-country Tamils in the wider contexts of colonial Indian plantation diasporas, a literature in which they have been relatively absent. Among the various manifestations of Up-country Tamils' identification with Sri Lanka examined in this dissertation are practices of place-making and place-naming, over a century of census data and descriptions, corrupt trade union politics, issues of agency and alienation during union actions, annual Hindu religious festivals, the transformation and objectification of traditional cultural practices, and transnational family networks. I place these articulations of ethnicity in broader cultural contexts by analyzing Up-country Tamils' growing identification with Sri Lankan spaces and changing relations with their ancestral homeland, India.