Academic literature on the topic 'Tea plantations Privatization Sri Lanka History'

At the most manifest level, this paper is about agricultural and agronomic terminology as found in the discourse of Tamil-speaking workers on Sri Lanka's tea plantations or tea estates, as they are called there. My use of the terms agricultural and agronomic in this context is admittedly idiosyncratic. In the tea estates of Sri Lanka, two kinds of agricultural (in the unmarked sense) terminology are in use, one belonging to managerial agriculture and the other to folk agriculture. But by and large, the tea estate is the regime of managerial agriculture. Whereas in village India, folk agriculture prevails. I call the class of terms belonging to managerial agriculture, agronomic terminology, and reserve the term “agricultural terminology” for the domain of folk agriculture. By analyzing four communicative events that I observed and recorded on tea estates in Sri Lanka, I attempt to show how these two terminological worlds interact. The nature of that interaction is such that the dominant terminology of agronomy may be seen to be deconstructed by the subdominant terminology of village agriculture.

Immigrant Tamil literature has an important place in Highland literature. Highland Tamil literature can be considered a part of immigrant literature. It is a rich literary field with many literary genres like folk literature, poetry, short stories, novels, dramas, and essays. Highland writers have contributed to and enriched the field of literature. Their field of literature is expanding beyond the Sri Lankan highlands to include Tamil Nadu, European countries, and other countries in the world. In this way, Maatthalai Somu is an international Tamil writer who records Sri Lanka (Highland), India (Tamil Nadu), Australia and the lives of Tamils living in them. Highland literature is two hundred years old. European countries that conquered large parts of the world to accumulate capital, exploited the resources of their colonies and the labour of indigenous peoples. In this way, the British, who took control of Sri Lanka in 1815, ended the Kandy monarchy. In 1820, coffee plantations were started. After that, they also cultivated cash crops like sugarcane, tea, and rubber. The South Indian Tamils migrated and settled in the highlands for the manpower to work on these large plantations. These Tamils are called Highland Tamils. Famine and oppression in India in the nineteenth century also caused Tamils to immigrate to Sri Lanka. The hard labour of Tamils was used in creating and cultivating these plantations. The history and life problems of such highland Tamils have been recorded by the highland Tamil writer Maatthalai Somu in his fiction.

In this contribution I propose to examine an aspect of Sri Lankan agrarian history which is often alluded to but rarely studied in depth: the process of high land appropriation for the development of coffee, tea, rubber and coconut plantations. The development of a land market in the Indian subcontinent is becoming a promising field of research for the study of imperial impact as a process at work in specific contexts.The Sri Lankan case differs from the Indian one in that land appropriation was originally meant for and followed by large scale land alienation to outsiders–the planters. This process has attracted the interest of most historians writing on the history of the Raj in Ceylon, but usually the only aspect stressed has been the appropriation by the Colonial State of forest and chena(land devoted to slash-and-burn cultivation) for sale to British planters.