Biopower, Social Control, and Resistance in Sri Lanka's

Biopower, Social Control, and Resistance in Sri Lanka’s Plantations Chris Neubert, U.S. Fulbright Scholar ICES “Ethical Futures” Conference 1 June 2013

“In the future, we will document everything… That will be our identity.”1

At a recent roundtable forum in Hatton, Sri Lanka, several community members were discussing what it means to be an Up-country Tamil in Sri Lanka today. And while the discussion ranged from the fading links with South India to the importance of a quality education, the aforementioned statement struck me as a poignant reflection of how much the Up-country Tamil identity has been defined by systematic disenfranchisement. Up-country Tamils were denied citizenship rights – denied the very paper that would confirm their citizenship – for decades after independence in 1948 in a nation-state their parents and grandparents helped create. This lack of documents means retirees who have no birth certificates are denied pension benefits. Without deeds, families who have lived in the same home for over 75 years can be evicted at the whim of estate management. Students who struggle through years of schooling fail to pass an exam that does not talk about their families, their histories, or their realities, denying them access to another document that in Sri Lanka is essential to access most jobs or any higher education.

Of course, Up-country Tamil identity is about more than the marginalization, oppression, or disenfranchisement caused by the lack of access to their government through the denial of certain documents. These challenges do not define the individuals who live, work, raise families, care for their neighbors, worship their gods and eventually die and are buried in and around the plantations. There is a vibrant culture and community that embraces Up-country Tamil identity, despite the continued frustrations this identity and the people endure. So, while this paper will focus on understanding the various forms of oppression that

1 Male focus group participant. February 16, 2013. Hatton, Sri Lanka.

1 the community experiences, my ultimate goal is to demonstrate how the Up- country Tamil people are refusing to be defined by the troubles of the past and are tackling these challenges to their livelihood.

Entrenched poverty and marginalization has existed among Up-country Tamils for several generations, since before the arrival of the first plantation workers in Sri Lanka in the early nineteenth century. These early migrants cleared the hill country in preparation for massive British coffee plantations, who then established a system of labour control with elements that continue unaltered – though not unchallenged – today. These early coffee plantations were strict, semi-autonomous regions that coerced labour through the authoritarian use of biopower.

Coined by Michel Foucault (1978), biopower is loosely used to describe a multitude of operations intended to administer life; that is, the term speaks of how populations are controlled, their bodies subjugated (1978:139). The term has been applied to the Up-country Tamil population before. Geographer James Duncan first examines how the early British planters built their plantations on social structures enforced through the use of biopower, and though he ultimately concludes that they failed in their attempts to establish completely autonomous and authoritarian control over the coffee plantations, his analysis of their various attempts is intriguing.

Despite the failure of the coffee planters, the plantation economy, existing as it has with little change for nearly two hundred years, continues to reproduce attempts to exercise biopower. However, Duncan contends that biopower is not absolute, and that wherever biopower is being used to subdue and control a population there will also be resistance to that control. It is my intention to demonstrate in this paper that the estates today continue to exercise biopower to control the plantation labour, but also that the Up-country Tamil community, by resisting this exercise of

2 power and empowering their own community, is forging an ethical future for themselves.2

I. Destruction and Construction in the Early Plantations

The story of the plantation sector in Sri Lanka begins in the early nineteenth century when the British colonizers first imagined capitalist economic possibilities in the forests of the hill country in central Sri Lanka. After struggling to subdue the land in the former Kandyan Kingdom for several years, the British government enacted the Crown Lands Encroachment Ordinance of 1840, paving the way for the rapid and relatively inexpensive growth of the coffee plantations. The first planters imported Tamil labour from South India to clear the land and establish the first plantations dedicated to coffee production. The rapid deforestation that occurred during this period replaced one of the most diverse ecosystems in the world with a plantation economy dependent on a monoculture and non-native labour (Webb 2002:2).

Beginning in the 1870s, a series of coffee crop failures brought on by a fungus spread to all of the coffee plantations on the island, causing a dramatic and near immediate end to the coffee industry in Sri Lanka. First noticed in 1869, the disease did not have a noticeable impact on coffee production until 1871, when H.S.O. Russell, the Government Agent (GA) for the Central Province, noted with alarm that coffee production was less than one-quarter of expected outcome (ARC 1871:39). Within little more than ten years, coffee production was all but nonexistent. Investors and producers turned to tea as an alternative. Already

2A brief note about methodology: the research gathered for this paper comes from a series of formal interviews, informal conversations and one focus group discussion conducted by me in the towns and estate areas of Hatton, Talawakelle, Kotagala, and Bogawantalawa. Additional interviews were conducted in Colombo and Kandy. All interviews and conversations recounted here took place between January and May 2013. The names of all informants have been changed, except where the informant is a prominent figure discussing material used elsewhere in this paper. All quotes used by informants in the paper are taken from direct transcriptions of the interview or conversation and attempt to reproduce as accurately as possible the statement as it was delivered.

3 introduced by James Taylor in 1867, tea had proven to be very productive in the hill country and could be produced at higher elevations, opening new regions to more extensive cultivation.

Still, coffee had left its legacy in the form of the plantation system of management, and as Duncan describes, this system was dependent on the use of biopower by management to exercise control:

The coffee estates were spatially demarcated sites of authoritarian biopower within the colony. At their worst they were ‘zones of social abandonment’ where the mere survival of labourers was the goal of the planter. Within these spaces, planters exercised a defacto sovereignty over their workers. Because workers strongly resisted attempts to transform them into abstract, docile bodies, the planters resorted to surveillance and force, justifying such coercion on the grounds that the workers were degraded, pointing to their acts of resistance as confirmation of their moral failure (2007:99)

Furthermore, anthropologist E. Valentine Daniel notes that the militarized world that defined the coffee and later tea plantations “impel an apparently willing labour force to consent, signifying the militarization and radical remaking of the relations among people as well as between people and land (1996:77).” As I will explore in the next section, this tension between willfully made choices and coerced consent has historically defined the existence and use of biopower on the plantations, and that tension still exists today.

The plantation economy was not designed because the regimentation of a plantation is more beneficial to the cash crop being raised. Instead, the plantation economy is an agro-ecological system structured to control labour, and any benefit to the crop is only a result of the maximization of the efficiency of the labour. As Duncan states, the exercise of biopower was an essential part of maintaining this control in the coffee plantations. And because the plantation system is ultimately a

4 labour control mechanism, the demise of coffee did not lead to the demise of the plantation system. Instead, the system was adapted to support a new cash crop: tea.

The tea industry that rose to replace coffee inherited the plantation system of management, but with several key differences. As a perennial crop, tea requires maintenance year round, and in the late nineteenth century this meant that a somewhat, or at least nominally, transitory labour force became a permanent fixture in the hill country of Sri Lanka. The colonial notion that tea of quality required “nimble fingers” for plucking the bud meant that women and children became a desired part of the labour force. With the transition to tea, labour in the plantations eventually became, and remains, defined by strict gender roles and divisions between men’s work and women’s work.

Regardless of whether coffee or tea was being grown, housing on the plantations has long been used by the estate management as a means of controlling the labour force. Originally constructed by the British during the period of coffee production, the standard line room consists of one or two rooms and a kitchen. The original British lines were limited to an area of about 100 square feet, and it is estimated today that 76 percent of the approximately 800,000 estate residents are living in homes of 400 square feet or less (Atukorala 2009:6). The most defining characteristic of the lines, and the most common complaint conveyed to me, is the close proximity of one room to the next. Each individual room shares two to three walls with other line rooms, and usually houses an entire family. Several Up- country Tamils related to me extreme cases of families of up to eight people sharing one 100 square foot line room. And while certainly that is not the norm in the plantations today, the consensus is clear: the lines are overcrowded and leave almost no room for personal, private space for individuals.

Of course, this is by design. The British used lines in the coffee period both because they were an inexpensive way to house large numbers of people, but also, as Duncan notes, because “it was believed that smaller lines instilled a sense of

5 belonging and decreased both fighting and plotting against the planter” (2007:84). That the line rooms still exist and house the majority of the estate worker population today speaks to the enduring existence of biopower within the plantation system. As in the British period, ownership of the line rooms today remains vested in the estate management. Families who live in these rooms, even if they have occupied the room for several generations, must approach the estate management for permission to make any alterations to the room.

In the whole of the plantations in Sri Lanka, the land has been used to manipulate the worker, structured in neat rows, pruned to follow the slope of the hillside, with limited access to other facilities or outside communities. The goal is to isolate the communities, while also keeping them under easy – if not constant – surveillance. By manipulating the physical environment in order to control the worker, the British inserted structures into the plantation economy that were enforced by biopower, and which still thrive in the plantations today.

II. Forging a Place-based Identity

Ultimately, the introduction of plantations proved to be the most dramatic physical and social transformation in the recorded history of the Sri Lankan central highlands. Of course, the end of coffee did not mean the end of the plantation system.

Over time, new communities and a new society emerged that was markedly different from the world this community left behind, based more on social hierarchy and gendered division of labour than on caste, ethnicity or religion. As Daniel notes, “from the very beginning, the structure of these immigrants’ society was to be different from that of South India’s villages, re-formed to suite the interests and requirements of a capitalist estate economy.” Chief among the differences in this societal restructuring was that “with few exceptions, they [Tamil labourers] were not allowed to cultivate any land for growing cereals or vegetables for their own consumption, so the land they worked on did not directly yield their

6 subsistence (1996:75).” This lack of access to land beyond the simple means of participation in the dominant cash crop economy remains the status quo for people living in the plantations today.

The transition from coffee to tea coincided with the transition of the Up-country Tamil people in Sri Lanka from migrant labourers to a permanent, unique community with their own dialect, culture, and ethnic identity. Over the next century and a half, this community would form trade unions and political parties, and fight to expand their rights as workers and citizens of an independent Sri Lanka. More recently, as ethnic identity has become a source of power and privilege in post-colonial Sri Lanka, the Up-country, or Malaiyaka, Tamil population has faced the challenge of creating a unique identity in a politicized and often violent context. Central to the creation of a unique “Up-country Tamil” identity has been the specific acknowledgement of place as an identifying factor, sometimes even more important than identification with the specific work of plantation labour.

Up-country Tamil identity has been forged, like most ethnic identity in Sri Lanka, in a post-independence world that is extremely conscious of ethnic identification. This particular identity also emerges from two very specific and unique contexts. First, in relation to the plantation work that dominates the livelihood of this group, and second, in relation to the specific place – the hill country of Sri Lanka – where this identity was created. The importance of place here cannot be understated. It is how Up-country Tamils come to create personal identities through relationships with each other, but also through their relationship with the other groups that inhabit the hill country and the rest of Sri Lanka, where identity politics have played a central role since at least the 1950s.

Up-country Tamils have been known by various names throughout their history in Sri Lanka. The British government agents almost always referred to them derogatorily as “coolies,” and in post-independence Ceylon the group was

7 separated from the rest of the population as “Indian Origin Tamils;” that is, not originating here, not Sri Lankan. Anthropologist Daniel Bass explains the impact that this ethnic confusion, and the context it occurred in, has had on the formation of a modern, distinct identity:

Although “Indian Origin Tamil” is more progressive than Indian Tamil, its stress on origins rather than present residence implies… that they are not “sons of the soil.” Sri Lankans of all ethnic groups commonly use the phrase “sons of the soil” to refer to the extent of their seemingly primordial attachment to Sri Lankan spaces... To be seen as legitimately Sri Lankan, one's identity must be derived from the land, i.e. one should be a son of the soil (2013:64).

This concept of identity in Sri Lanka rooted in place is important. Throughout my conversations and interviews with Up-country Tamils this point – that Up-country Tamil identity is unique and different because of the attachment to the Up-country as a home or homeland – was continually repeated. Considering that Up-country Tamil identity was created specifically in relationship to a Sri Lankan place, it is unfortunate that this community has faced and continues to struggle with exclusion from greater Sri Lankan society.

III. Biopower in the Coffee Plantations

As previously mentioned, the society that began to emerge in the early plantation period was very different from the society that these labourers left behind. However, these changes did not happen simply through the processes of migration and resettlement, but were an example of attempts by British planters to wield biopower to create docile bodies to work in the plantations. As Duncan describes, the British preferred to establish their plantations in spaces that were replaced with new meaning derived from their actions. They attempted to create fullly abstract spaces where:

[E]veryday life is thoroughly commodified and bureaucratized. As an ideal, abstract space requires the construction of ‘abstract bodies’ which conform to it. Abstract bodies, are bodies that are made docile, useful, disciplined, rationalized, normalized, and controlled sexually; such bodies are seen as economic resources to be rationally manage and utilized to capacity (2007:68-69).

Essentially, the British wanted a labour force of bodies that were divorced from all familiar contexts – culturally, environmentally, etc. – so that they could more easily adapt these bodies to British economic requirements and the means of control to fulfill those requirements. Naturally, the Tamil men and women from South India resisted the attempts to transform their bodies into docile, useful, disciplined, rationalized, normalized, and sexually controlled cogs in the plantation mechanism.

Yet, in the early years of coffee production, this is how biopower was expressed. The planters were fully intent on creating “synaptic regimes of power” where they attempted to insert their means of control into “the very grain, the very bodies” of the Tamil labourers. And when the workers resisted, “the British administrators and planters resigned themselves to coercion. They aimed their programmes and policies at the… migrant labourers’ very bodily existence – their aim was to ‘make survive’ and to attempt to squeeze out every ounce of labour from their bodies” (Duncan 2007:189).

Ultimately, the legacy of the various attempts by the British planter community to subdue the Tamil population by dehumanizing them and conceptualizing them as mere “resources,” led to some of the most devastating long term consequences for the Up-country Tamil population, especially in relation to how future administrative institutions conceived them. Duncan (2007) describes, for instance, how Tamil labourers refused to submit to inspections for Cholera, fearing the colonizers intentions, and as a result many labourers succumbed to disease despite efforts by the colonial government to prevent extremely high death rates.

Duncan also documents at least one instance where the colonial government allowed migrants and the villagers they encountered along the route to the Up- country to die of disease. Governor West Ridgeway, in reference to the high death rates along these paths to the plantations, said “’it will be seen that certain districts in the Northern Province were sacrificed… to secure the safety of the planting districts’” to which Duncan concludes, “It is difficult to think of clearer examples than this of governmentality, of treating a population as a resource, and of sovereignty – the decision by the state as to who would live and who would die” (2007:124).

However, the goal on the plantation system in the coffee period was never to maximize the wellbeing of the labourer, and as such, it was the labourer that suffered the most at the hands of government policies to achieve the ultimate goal: the maximization of profits. While the coffee trade ultimately failed in Sri Lanka, its legacy of ensuring the mere survival of labour to maximize profit continues to be reproduced in the tea industry today.

IV. Biopower Today: Land and Housing

On my most recent visit to an estate community I was accompanied by a lawyer from Talawakelle, Anthony, who took me to see the line room that he had recently vacated. Before arriving, Anthony and I stopped at a cemetery where several generations of his family were buried. He pointed out the graves of his grandmother, his brother, and his father, wanting to make sure that I understood his deep connection to this place, but also adding wryly that each of his dead relatives “had to get permission” to be buried on estate land. Anthony’s family had lived in this estate for over 75 years, and in the line room where he grew up there was a photograph of his grandmother and father, surrounded by the rest of the estate community, standing in front of the very line room we were then visiting. Anthony’s family had not just lived in the same estate community for three

10 generations across 75 years; they had lived in the very same ten by twelve foot room.

Despite this long history of continuous habitation, their legal status in relation to their home had not changed. Anthony, like his grandmother, was not allowed to make any alterations to his home. His mother, an estate plucker who is now retired, had once relocated her kitchen to a smaller line room just a few feet away from their front door to open up space for her expanding family and eliminate problems caused by smoke from the cooking fire that filled their line every night. When the management discovered the alteration, they suspended Anthony’s mother without pay for a week because as he said, “we violated the estate rights.”

Anthony finally moved out of the line room with his mother after obtaining his law degree. The final straw, he told me, was when the estate threatened a lawsuit over a piece of agricultural land that his family had been using for decades that he wanted to improve. Fortunately for him and his mother, his successful law practice enabled him to move off the estate and into a home with a proper deed and freedom.

As a lawyer, Anthony understands more about land and housing rights than any of his ancestors living in the line rooms. Sri Lankan law, he told me, has a provision that grants a deed to anyone who continuously occupies a piece of land for at least 10 years. However, he recalled a case where several retired estate workers filed suit against the estate management for the deed to the homes they had lived in for over 20 years. The case went to trial, but because land law does not apply equally to the estates as it does to the rest of the country, the case was dismissed.

The estates’ legal rights to the land, as set out in the privatization policies in 1992, also extend to all of the human modifications on that land – including roads, homes, schools, gardens and whatever else may lie within the confines of the plantation boundaries. To live in the estate you must work in the estate, or at least live with someone who does, and many families across the plantations are living in

11 such housing situations. But for Up-country Tamils who want to maintain ties to their ancestral home without being forced to work in the tea industry, there are few alternatives.

Rajan is a teacher at a school on an estate near Talawakelle. He grew up on an estate near St. Clair Falls and, after finishing university, returned to the estate to raise a family near the church where he was baptized and near his friends and family. Since Rajan was not employed with the tea company, however, he had limited options: he could have moved in with his family in an already crowed line room, or he could have moved his family to Talawakelle, where his children would rarely see their grandparents. Instead, he asked the estate management for a special arrangement that would allow him to live on the estate, but away from the line rooms. The management agreed, but there was a price. Rajan built his own home, on estate land, but explained that he has “no rights to land, because there is a document I don’t have.” Rajan is referring to the deed, and the lack of deeds in the Up-country is a common source of aggravation.

Up-country Tamils are frequently obstructed in day-to-day interactions by this lack of deeds to the land they occupy. They cannot receive personal bank loans without a deed (though shady and usurious moneylending is common), they cannot expand their home without their deed, and they cannot receive services from the pradeshiya sabha without a deed. As I will discuss in the next section, this lack of deeds, another document made unavailable to Up-country Tamils, is motivating a movement to extend land rights to the estate communities.

But while this movement grows, people like Rajan find themselves invested in a very untenable situation. When Rajan built his home on the estate, he spent more than Rs. 500,000, but as he acknowledged, “I can’t use [my home] in future. I have three daughters and one son. [Without] any rights, I can’t give the property to my son or daughter.” Rajan is right to be worried. While travelling with Anthony to his home estate, we passed another home separate from the line rooms that was

12 boarded and locked up. Rights to the use of this home, located within estate boundaries, were fully vested in the estate management, but the physical building itself was actually constructed by a family – with permission from the management – at a cost of Rs. 800,000. After a minor and unrelated disagreement, however, the management chose to evict the family, enforcing their decision through the court system, without ever reimbursing their investment. The family now lives in a small makeshift hut behind the home they originally constructed. Further down the road, however, Anthony pointed out to me a series of recently constructed building that he called “encroachments.” According to Anthony, these are homes that Sinhalese villagers built on estate land without any consequences or challenges from the estate. It is a clear example of how the law that grants the estates almost exclusive rights to the land is not meant to protect the physical integrity of the estate, but rather is an extension of biopower, intended to subdue, maintain, and control a population – in this case the estate’s very own workforce. These incidents also demonstrate how the state participates in maintaining the estate’s use of biopower, granting it an air of legality through these court decisions. Ultimately, the exercise of biopower by the estate management can only be maintained if it is sanctioned by the government.

Perhaps more troubling, this exercise of biopower on this particular estate appears to have been extended to the Up-country Tamil population, 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 who built a home 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).

V: Biopower Today: Women’s Bodies

In previous studies, the plantation system in Sri Lanka has been compared to sociologist Erving Goffman’s (1961) concept of the “total institution,” a system where barriers are created to prevent social interaction with the outside world and these barriers are often built into the physical aspects of the institution. Scholars Kumari Jayawardena (1972) and Oddvar Hollup (1994) both apply the total institution concept to life in the plantations. Yet Daniel Bass (2013) in his ethnography notably departs from the “stereotypical presentations of plantations as prison-like enclaves.” Up-country Tamil identity, he notes, was not created in a space of complete isolation, but rather only became a distinct identity “through interactions with other ethnic communities and with the dominant discourses of ethnicity in Sri Lanka.” (2013:44).

Bass views the concept of the total institution as an idea that, at best, no longer neatly categorizes the plantation communities, and, at worst, has the potential to “[undermine] Up-country Tamils’ many connections to the rest of the island” (2013:44). However, in the specific case of women Up-country Tamil labourers in the plantation system, the concept of the estate as a total institution remains a relevant starting point for discussion. Menaha Kandasamy, the first woman president of a major estate trade union, writes that “what is striking here is that plantation women and their bonded resident status [within a]… ‘closed system’ and ‘total institution’ ideally served the patriarchal interests of… the coloniser” (2002:8). Furthermore, unlike their male counterparts – men who have the time and space to participate in the work of creating culture and identity – women working in the plantations are much less likely to interact with the world outside their communities simply because their time and the spaces they inhabit are much more controlled (RFWM 2012:71). However, Bass’s warning against ignoring the connections that Up-country Tamils form with the rest of the island is important, and indeed women who are organizing to undermine the forces of biopower that

14 seek to control so much of their lives are doing so by utilizing connections to other women in the Up-country, across Sri Lanka, and around the world.

The tea industry in Sri Lanka is completely dependent on women’s labour, and the use of biopower to control, manipulate, and regulate women’s bodies is a clear example of Duncan’s definition of biopower that is “exercised within individual bodies, inserting itself into their actions and attitudes, their discourses, learning processes and everyday lives” (2007:20, emphasis added). Whenever I spoke to women estate workers, who overwhelmingly work in the estate as tea pluckers, about the problems they face on the job their responses always began with the effects of the work on their bodies.

For example, three women I spoke to, all members of the Red Flag Women’s Movement, listed in rapid succession the various bodily concerns that women face in the tea fields: the lack of an eating place, the lack of toilet facilities, wasp bites, snake bites, leech bites, sexual harassment from supervisors, neck strain from carrying leaf-filled bags, dry and cracking skin on fingers and thumbs, asthma, breast pains caused by constant friction against tea bushes, the lack of facilities to feed infants on the job, the lack of relief for pregnant women, and skin rashes from fertilizers, pesticides or insecticides. Priya, a teacher from Kotagala, recalled how her mother’s body would itch all over after she returned from the fields. Anthony, the lawyer from Talawakelle who lives with his mother, a retired plucker, told me that 42 years of plucking and carrying heavy leaves in a bag suspended from her head left her with a permanent indentation on the top of her skull. “She never enjoyed this work,” Anthony said, and in a final bit of cruelty from a system that never fully respected her labour, she is unable to receive her pension of Rs. 100,000 because the estate where she was born has no documentation of her birth.

Inevitably, each of the deep conversations I had about women’s work in the plantations would turn toward a discussion of the plucker’s lack of any control over her time. Priya’s mother would wake up every morning at 4:00 a.m. to prepare

15 meals at home for her husband and children and then rush to the muster at 7:30 for her work assignment. Some days she would walk long distances and up high mountains, leaving her exhausted even before lunch at 12:30. For her lunch break, if she needed to use the toilet she would rush home, again, some days a very long distance, and return to the fields by 1:30. Her work day usually ended around 5:00 or 6:00, when the kankanis3 would weigh the leaves4. She would then return home, cook again for her husband and children, eat her own meal after everyone had finished, clean the home, put the children to bed, and hopefully retire herself by 10:30, leaving about 5 and a half hours for sleep. There is little room in this daily schedule for personal or private time. Each part of the woman’s day is allocated toward one of her “triple burdens” – her work in the estate, her work at home, and her work in the community (RFWM 2012:25).

The objectification and commodification of women’s bodies within the plantation economy began with the transition from coffee to tea in the late nineteenth century when women’s labour was first incorporated into the workforce. As Kandasamy notes, “women’s labour was used on the belief that the nimble fingers of the women would not harm the tea bud” (2002:29). However, the migration from India to Sri Lanka required women to fully submit their bodies to the patriarchal plantation system, not just their labour and their fingers: “Women were brought, not only to toil in the plantations but to serve the sexual needs of the male workers as well as to reproduce the workforce” (Kandasamy 2002:27). The objectification of women became an important extension of the use of biopower by planters to

3 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. 4 The weighing of leaves has been a significant source of contention on the estates, and the Red Flag Women’s Movement has run several training programs to teach women to read the scale, record the weight of their leaves and challenge the kankani if necessary. This has apparently been an issue for a very long time, as E. Valentine Daniel recorded similar frustrations in Charred Lullabies. The Red Flag Women’s Union has been organize workers to combat this issue as well.

16 dehumanize and thus control the workforce. Consider the following description of tea plucking from Henry Cave’s early record of the tea industry:

Women are preferred to men for this work and earn as much as twenty-five cents, or about fourpence a day. They are not always the wives of the male coolies of the estate; many of them come over from India to seek the high rate of wages above mentioned. They look very picturesque, with their fine glossy hair and dreamy black eyes, their ears, necks, arms, and ankles adorned with silver ornaments, and their gay cloths of many colours falling in graceful folds while standing intent upon their work among the bushes. To such an extent does practice accelerate the action of eye, brain, the march of their nimble fingers, that it is difficult for the uninitiated to believe how carefully chosen is each leaf or shoot. Plucking is a most important branch of the tea-planter's business, and requires careful teaching and constant supervision (1900:150, emphasis added).

In just one short paragraph, Cave fully objectifies the woman plucker. He names nine parts of the plucker’s pluckers body and then assigns a value to the parts of her body based on either its sexual attractiveness (its picturesqueness) or its contribution to the woman’s labour. To Cave, this woman does not have any other value. She apparently has no dreams or desires of her own, other than to seek a “high” wage, and Cave concludes that this woman and her nine body parts must be constantly supervised. It is a chilling example of how biopower segments, commodifies, and then controls women’s bodies in the plantations.

Today it is unlikely that an estate manager (publicly, at least) would describe pluckers with such overtly sexualized and demeaning language. This does not mean that women’s bodies are no longer objectified – an advertisement for Ceylon Tea is likely to prominently feature the image of a tea plucker – but it does mean that women’s lives have improved through the efforts of individuals and groups like the

Red Flag Women’s Movement. Still, changes of the sort that would be required to completely eliminate the expression of biopower within the plantations have, historically, not occurred since the plantations were introduced to the hill country nearly 200 years ago. And yet, despite the massive task, there are pockets of resistance and the stirrings of movements across the plantations to dramatically reshape life across the Up-country once again.

VI. Contesting Biopower

Life on the estate is lived in spaces that are not controlled, regulated, or owned by the worker, nor the worker’s friends, family, neighbors and oftentimes not even by individuals with a shared linguistic, ethnic, caste or class identity. It is a life where an estate worker could conceivably go days, weeks, or longer without inhabiting a space that is not ultimately controlled by her employer. After generations of living and understanding a world where all the spaces and places that are familiar and comforting to the individual are ultimately derived from her participation in an agro-industrial complex, defined by a patriarchal ethno-hierarchy, imagining alternatives and resisting the status quo could be a nearly impossible task. Yet the Up-country Tamils that I spoke to could all imagine a better future for their communities. In fact, two common threads appeared in every conversation that I had in the Up-country: a recognition that life for Tamils living and working in and around the estates is defined by oppression and poverty (though, the lived experiences of that oppression and poverty varies dramatically among individuals), and an ability to imagine a more hopeful and positive future for the community.

The movement for land rights has the potential to be transformative. It upends the foundational premise that the plantations are built on – the lack of any personal or communal space legally belonging to the workers in that system. It has the potential to lead to a reimagining of the world the workers inhabit, where connections to already meaningful places become deeper through the extension of legal rights and claims to those places.

But perhaps not. Up-country Tamils, as a community and as individuals, have already developed bonds with the place called the “Up-country.” Would those bonds really be deepened if they were sanctioned by a state that has repeatedly shown a lack of interest in the long-term wellbeing and dignity of the Up-country Tamil people? I spoke with several individuals who are able to provide something of an answer to that question. Muthu, a young Up-country Tamil man who grew up in the estates, talked at length of his deep affinity for Sri Lanka, though he added a strong qualification: “I love this country, and the resources, and everything. I love it. But the government? Government is different.” Muthu went on to describe how most non-Sinhalese in Sri Lanka feel like the government’s step-children – tolerated, at best, but never embraced and certainly not loved, “The present government and past governments act like step mothers… They promote Buddhism. They don’t care for the minority religions. Now the mentality of my people is that they don’t like the governments.”

The sentiment Muthu is expressing here – affinity for Sri Lankan the nation-state as a physical entity, but separate and distinct from the government– is one I heard many times in the Up-country. Most of the Up-country Tamils I spoke with agreed that the government cared little about them, and the general consensus is that most politicians are self-serving and most political parties are corrupt. Still, this does not mean that they have no interest in government. In fact, when asked about the role of government in their lives the Up-country Tamils I spoke to expressed a desire for an increased role for government. Thomas, a priest and community leader in Hatton, clearly explained that “If there are any privileges… in the villages5, [those privileges] should also be in the estates. But estates are not under the purview of the local government power structure.” Thomas then went on to describe a simple vision that is common in the estate communities: “Estates [should] come under the local government power structure, and in each estate there should be a post office,

5 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 units with their own governments.

19 market, clubs… a community hall, dispensary, bus stand, transportation facilities. Everything!”

Thomas, though he concluded by demanding everything, has actually expressed a desire for a basic human right – equal treatment by his government under the law. From his perspective, the villages scattered in and around the plantations, mostly Sinhala settlements, enjoy the full benefits of the government and its services, while he and his neighbors must make do with whatever the management of the estate they live on is willing to provide. In Sri Lanka today, as a result of the arrangements made after the government re-privatized the plantations in 1992, the estate management is responsible for providing many of the services to the estate communities that the Sri Lankan government provides to the rest of the country. For all of the Up-country Tamils living on estates that I spoke to, that meant that one of the 23 regional plantation companies (RPCs) was responsible for providing many of the services that the government delivers to the rest of the country’s citizens. The plantation management is therefore able to wield biopower not only through the leases that grant them control over the use of all the land, resources, and buildings in the estate, but through their additional role as a non-democratic, quasi-governmental service provider.

The current state of governance in the plantations is strikingly similar to the situation established in the coffee period, when planters pursued a strict laissez- faire capitalist policy and the government generally agreed to grant them a significant degree of autonomy (Duncan 2007:68). Though the status of governance on the estates today, where the government voluntarily and unilaterally ceded some of its sovereignty to privatized corporations (also created by the government) has created a situation where the Sri Lankan government is seen as both the cause of many of the problems on the plantations, but also the only solution.

Consider, for instance, this statement by Thambiah, a retired trade unionist, discussing the inability of Up-country Tamils on the estates to build new homes: “You can’t blame the company completely because the company says, ‘I am not the full owner of the estate lands. I am only the managing agent for a certain period… I came to do my business; I came to do my trade, so you cannot build any houses. I am answerable to the government.’”

Earlier in our conversation, Thambiah had described to me his understanding of the agreement between the government and the plantation companies, where the two sides agreed to divide all the lands, buildings, and resources without consulting the people – the workers – who lived there. It’s likely that his version is not far from the truth, but he concluded with an interesting note, “The companies were also unofficially instructed by the government not to allow the workers to build houses, to own lands on the plantation property.” There is no hard evidence to suggest any sort of instruction from the government to the companies, but Thambiah’s assertion recalls Muthu’s previous suggestion that the government cares little for the Up-country Tamil community.

However, Thambiah also clearly implied a more active government role to undermine Up-country Tamil prosperity. Thomas in an interview concurred with Thambiah’s assessment, “the government doesn’t want to treat the people equally in order to keep them as second class citizens… That is the mentality of the government. That is their approach to people.” Thomas ultimately concluded, as many who are marginalized in Sri Lanka have, that the Sinhala dominated government continually seeks to maintain total control of the government by undermining and weakening the rights of minority populations. For Up-country Tamils, this idea resonates because their own lived experience is one of government sanctioned marginalization. After all, until very recently this was a group of people who had to fight for basic citizenship rights. The long debate over citizenship, and the suffering that the Up-country Tamil community endured between independence and the completed restoration of citizenship in 2003,

21 created an enduring pain within the community that has not yet fully healed, as Thomas reveals when he is unable to hide his anger in this exchange:

Neubert: When the government, during the 70s and 80s, was pursuing repatriation policies, sending people back to India, how do you react to that…

Thomas: It’s very painful!

Neubert: …as someone who considers this your home, to be told by the government that…

Thomas: It’s inhuman!

Neubert: …it’s not your home?

Thomas: It is inhuman! It’s inhuman. Without consulting the leaders of the plantation tea estate community, both Prime Ministers – Sirimavo and Shastri – made this agreement… and the people, those who went there, most of them suffered economically, culturally, okay? There are painful stories from the camps. Once they reached Tamil Nadu the people were divided. Father is on one side, mother is another side, children, grandchildren… They all went to new places, and went through a lot of hardships.

The disgust that Thomas is displaying here toward a government that dehumanized him and his family, friends, and community, almost approaches a sense of betrayal. This betrayal is not just for the government’s treatment during the citizenship debacle, but also for their failure to protect some Up-country Tamils from civil violence in the 1970s and the failure again to consult any Up-country Tamils when the decision was made to privatize the estates again in 1992. Ultimately, in the eyes of many Up-country Tamils, the hardships they face are a direct result of enduring a government that does not view them as full participants in the nation-state.

In part, this is because historically Up-country Tamils have been blocked from full access to the nation-state, starting at the most grassroots levels of government: “One of the continuing absurdities inherited from the period of the colonial plantation Raj is the exclusion of plantations from the jurisdiction of local government authorities” (Uyangoda 2012: 127).

This “absurdity,” has been identified by Up-country Tamil leader A. Lawrence (2011) who advocates a complete reshaping of the boundaries of governance in the Up-country areas to more accurately reflect the needs of the people that are living there, rather than the needs of the industry. Lawrence proposes a system of devolution of power, and power-sharing among ethnic groups, as a way to ensure an equal voice for all groups living in the Up-country. It’s a remarkable concept, and evidence of the sort of radical rethinking that is necessary in the Up-country for the population there to fully embrace an ethical future.

Plantation biopower survives today because it was vested in the estate management by the government in 1992, after the government previously usurped that power from the private companies in the 1970s. Given this truth, it is a logical conclusion that the best means for restricting the oppressive use of biopower in the plantations lies in the expansion of democratic forms of governance in the daily lives – at work and otherwise – of the Up-country Tamil population.

I would be remiss if I concluded this paper without mentioning the importance that many Up-country Tamils have vested in education on the estates. On several occasions in my role as a researcher/scholar, I was invited to visit schools, meet family members that had received advanced schooling, or assist in the production of a narrative on the importance of education with young Up-country Tamils. Whatever the reason, it is striking that this community has so embraced the empowerment-through-education concept, especially considering how unequal the access to education remains in the estates. Sri Lankan education (and in turn, it could be argued, the entire economy) relies on a colonial era system of rigorous

23 testing that benefits the students whose parents can afford extra tutelage, and the communities whose histories are being taught. Not surprisingly, it is not the Up- country Tamil community’s history that has entered the common historical lexicon in Sri Lanka.

And yet, it is their history by which many Up-country Tamils come to understand their identities and their place within this nation-state called Sri Lanka. Consider, for instance, this lament by one of the participants in the discussion from the beginning of this paper:

To think that this is my country, and this is my land… such things are not included in the education system. If you take all the history, or civics, whatever it is. Geography. Nothing is there to learn about our history. We are learning about British history and the Second World War and Sri Lanka? It’s a modified history. There is no chance, no chance to learn our history. Where we’re coming from, why we came, what took place in 1949… there is no chance to learn. From grade one to university level. There is no proper way for people to know why and what we are doing in Sri Lanka.

This participant is clearly distressed by the fact that the very idea of an Up-country Tamil identity, forged through an affinity for place, and even to some extent for the nation-state of Sri Lanka, is not recognized by their government, or even the education system established to socialize their children. There is an understandable fear among Up-country Tamil that their identity and historically untenable position in Sri Lankan life could be undermined by further marginalization by the government, and this fear, I believe, is the source of much of the desire of Up- country Tamils to be included by their government.

It is not simply fear, however, that is motivating this desire, but also hope. The Up- country Tamils that I met are consistently hopeful that their actions, however small, however long they may take, will lead to a better life for themselves and their

24 neighbors. And it is this hope that a better future is possible through democratic processes that is fuelling the current expansion of land rights, women’s leadership, and education among Up-country Tamils. By creating a better, more ethical, future, the Up-country Tamils are doing something unique in Sri Lanka: creating a place- based identity that is unique; defined by what it is not, but not defined necessarily in hostility to what it is not.

Place is an ephemeral concept. The world that individual bodies inhabit does not become filled with meaningful places because the places are inherently meaningful. Place only exists through the bonds individuals form through continued interaction with their physical surroundings. If those bonds could be shaped with more autonomy and less institutional control, it is possible that this could shake the oppressive foundations that support the plantation system. It is impossible to predict the future of a population whose fortunes have been so mired in the past and have very recently become so dynamic, but I do believe it is possible to conclude that the future for Up-country Tamils is bright, but that future can only be realized once the dogmatic, oppressive and hierarchical structures of the plantation system have been replaced with an extension of democracy in the workplace and in relationship to the state.

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