Prospecciones de seguimiento en zonas demarcadas y fuera de zonas demarcadas

This dissertation seeks to destabilize this history in hopes of better understanding the contemporary subjectivities of Malaiyaha Tamil gender, community, and development on Sri Lanka’s tea plantations. Attending to these three spheres of collective practice— plantation life, migrant labor experience, and human development—I argue that Malaiyaha Tamils actively challenge historical representations of bonded labor and political voicelessness in order to rewrite their representative canon in Sri Lanka.

Chapter One takes key colonial and postcolonial moments in Malaiyaha Tamil history and political and economic points in which the question of their minority status was put on trial. By examining the process of minoritization, I use this history to contextualize the current issues of political alienation and economic struggle that workers and their representatives face today. I conclude by providing a working concept of

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community that seeks to unhinge Malaiyaha Tamil belonging from more rigid understandings of their placement in Sri Lanka and place them within more pragmatic and future-oriented modes of belonging.

Chapter Two explores the core of this pragmatic community and explores gender subjectivities that emerge on the plantations among retired, married, and sterilized women. These narratives contribute to what Valentine Daniel calls a Malaiyaha Tamil “bardic heritage” (1996: 30-1), and I argue that this heritage is what makes Malaiyaha Tamil women significant producers of knowledge within their communities. Chapter Three continues exploring plantation subjectivity and focuses on the themes of movement and migrant labor and their effects on plantation group life dynamics and aspirations. With younger generations, wives, and husbands moving off of the plantation for work in Colombo or abroad, movement becomes a strategy for seeking social mobility, financial security, and community recognition. That being said, reflections on the insecurities and risks associated with migrant labor such as that of domestic work and undocumented urban work present contradictions and split subjectivities of pride and fear among community members, politicians, and development actors.

Chapter Four expands upon this question of assigning risk and focuses on the work of plantation NGOs and development workers who seek to improve the Malaiyaha Tamil community by improving living conditions and raising awareness around human rights. After providing a brief history of plantation development, I explore rights-based strategies and forms of global and transnational solidarity building that seek to release the working, Malaiyaha Tamil woman from paternalistic forms of development and labor. I

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conclude by exploring what such development work entails—namely, the production of categories of risk. I content that such categories of risk can produce cultural stigmas about plantation life and, in doing so, further complicate the goals and methodologies of development practice on the ground.

Chapter Five concludes the dissertation by rethinking what knowledge is being produced and circulated among and for Malaiyaha Tamils on the plantations. Working through their own expertise and knowing of their place in Sri Lanka, this minority community also engages techno-political forms of authority and knowledge that attempt to place and regard them on different terms. Using patient narratives and an exploration of a healing ritual in response to illness, I contend that Malaiyaha Tamils cultivate their own forms of expertise to tame uncertainty for the most possibility-enabling future.

METHODOLOGY

From October 2008 to October 2009 I carried out ethnographic research in Sri Lanka and with funding support from the National Science Foundation and Green Harbor Foundation. I spent the first month in Colombo, where I collected development and historical documents and spoke to politicians, activists, government ministry officials, and NGO personnel working in the plantation sector. In Colombo, I had the good fortune of meeting a local artist who gave me the contact information of a former plantation manager, Dillon, who had worked in the Hatton area. I contacted Dillon, and he told me that he knew of a family that I could stay with outside Hatton during my research period.

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Grateful for this contact, I proceeded to Kandy, the second largest city in Sri Lanka located in Central Province. Here, I stayed at the quarters of a local plantation NGO that was one of the first of its kind in the plantation sector for one month. I used the NGO’s extensive library on plantation, labor, and religious literature, and I participated and observed development and vocational trainings designed for a multi-ethnic rural and plantation youth and adults. I also met with other Kandy-based NGOs and union offices that were working closely with other development actors in Sri Lanka on Malaiyaha Tamil plantation issues. It was in Kandy that I met Kannaki, a plantation NGO field site coordinator for plantations outside Kandy town. I shared with her my plans to go to Hatton, and she introduced me to her elder brother and his family who were living and working on a plantation outside Hatton town and coincidentally close by to the place of residence that Dillon had mentioned.

In January 2008, I traveled to Hatton, a hill station town in Central Province’s Nuwara Eliya district sitting an elevation of 1271 meters above sea level. Under the Hatton-Dickoya Urban Council, Hatton joins with its smaller suburb-like town, Dickoya, and is surrounded by tea plantations. I spent the next ten months conducting ethnographic field research in two distinct spaces. In Hatton town, I worked with local NGOs and community leaders, observing their development initiatives and participating and observing workshops, seminars, and trainings for Malaiyaha Tamil plantation residents living in and around the Hatton area. I spent the rest of my time conducting ethnographic research among Malaiyaha Tamil plantation residents living within one of four divisions

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of an estate called Kirkwall,12 _{which was situated within a larger tea plantation}

approximately twelve kilometers outside Hatton and about only one hundred and fifty to two hundred yards from where I stayed.13 _{The division where I studied was primarily}

composed of Malaiyaha Tamils with the exception of a few Sinhala family members who were visiting the residences of their relations now and then. The sex, work force, and union data for Kirkwall Division, which was given to me by the plantation management staff, was as follows in the year of 2008-2009:

Figure 2.

Available Statistical Data for Kirkwall Division

(Data tabulated by Kirkwall staff at the end of January 2009)

Number of Persons, Sexes, and Households

Male 231

Female 249

Total # of Person 480 Total # of Families 82 Total # Line Rooms 107

Work Force (Registered & Casual)

Resident Non-Resident Total

Male 36 36 72

Female 88 53 141

Total 124 89 213

Worker-Union Affiliations

(Data tabulated by Kirkwall staff at the end of March 2009)

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12 _Pseudonym

13 _{I made the conscious decision to stay outside Hatton town so that I could be closer to the estates and}

maximize the amount of time in the days that I could spend there. Bus, while regular, were not frequent at night, and I would often spend nights in the homes of my interlocutors on various estates (Maskeliya, Norwood, Talawakelle, Kandy, Hatton) and/or only come home for or after dinner/sundown.

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Union Name # of Workers

Ceylon Workers’ Congress

(CWC) 47

Democratic Workers’

Congress (DWC) 18

Up-Country People’s Front

(UPF) 37

Non-Members 17

Through these community members and other contacts, I also interacted with plantation residents and Malaiyaha Tamils in hill station towns and areas outside Hatton. Having witnessed the social and interactional shifts that take place in the presence of NGO workers among plantation residents, I chose not to work with any escorting research assistants while on Kirkwall. But I did, however, work with a woman research assistant, who helped me prepare off-site transcriptions of my interviews and other audio recordings.