Stained by Tea- Labouring Lives of Malaiyaha (Up Country) Tamil Women in Sri Lanka

A community facing continuous erasure of their experience of being Tamil in Sri Lanka are the Malaiyaha Tamils or the Upcountry Tamils. Malaiyaha Tamils are the descendants of (mostly lower caste) Indian Tamils who were recruited through the kangany system to work on the colonial tea plantations in Ceylon. The community has a long history of struggle for citizenship in the course of which they have formed an ‘identity of place’ to emplace themselves within post-colonial Sri Lanka through complicated linkages between three important sites- Plantation, Up Country (Malaiyaham) and the neighbouring India. From the contemporary experience of labour protests by the community during the economic crisis in Sri Lanka, the paper focuses on the history of biased representations of the Malaiyaha women workers in colonial photography, post-war tourism, and the post-colonial State’s discourses on women workers’ migration where these women are marked as an extension of the ‘picturesque’ landscape and later a cheap source of domestic labourers for the cities. The paper then segues into poetry written by Malaiyaha Tamil women and the art of Hanusha Somasundaram, a contemporary artist from the community working with unorthodox media related to tea to etch an alternative history of plantation women workers drawing on the facts of the hard labour amidst a life in congested ‘line rooms’ and a difficult natural terrain of daily work. ‘An other tongue’, stained by tea, of resistance through poetry and art.