ABDF

The defeat of the Liberation Tamil Tigers of Eelam (LTTE) in Sri Lanka has made worldwide headlines recently. We got the image of two ethnic and religious groups locked in battle against one another. However this was an oversimplified view of the situation in Sri Lanka. What most of the outside world does not realize is that there are two distinct Tamil populations in Sri Lanka: Sri Lankan Tamils, and Estate Tamils. Each has a very different history, culture, and place in Sri Lankan society.

Sri Lankan Tamils have lived in Sri Lanka for thousands of years and predominate in the north of the island and along the east coast. While culturally, religiously and linguistically similar to their brethren in Tamil Nadu, the Tamil province of southern India, they also have had a long history separate from India and thus many differences as well. Similar, in a way, to the differences between the UK and the US. The current civil conflict in Sri Lanka involves this Tamil population.

Then there are the Estate Tamils, a community little known outside of Sri Lanka, and yet vital to Sri Lanka, and a major contributor to world food culture. These are the people who plant, grow, and process Ceylon Tea, considered one of the finest in the world, and the basis of most of our tea-based beverages. If you have ever drank a cup of Lipton Iced Tea, or had a hot cup of Bigelow Tea before bed, chances are that at least some of the tea blend you have drunk was handled by Estate Tamils. Earl Grey, English Breakfast, Irish Breakfast; a long list of teas based wholly on, or as part of a blend, comes from the tea estates of Sri Lanka. And yet the world knows little of these people, of their history, culture, and current situation.

The British took over Ceylon (as Sri Lanka was then called) in 1813 from the Dutch, who had held it for a hundred years after snatching it away from the Portuguese. At the time of conquest, Ceylon was famous for not tea, but coffee, which at the time was the beverage of choice among European elites. The British settled down to reap the wealth from the harvest of Sri Lankan coffee.

However, Mother Nature had other ideas and during the early 1820s, blight descended on Sri Lanka, wiping out the entire coffee crop. Any new plants planted were withered away; seemingly Sri Lanka itself had determined that no more coffee should grow on her mountain slopes. In desperation the British looked for another cash crop that could be grown plantation-style. It was John Bigelow in 1826 who decided to give tea a try. He imported several varieties of tea plant, and begin to experiment with them. He quickly made two discoveries. First, he created the hybrid variety of tea known as Ceylon, an exceptional, high-quality tea, and second, that Ceylon tea flourished incredibly well in the highlands of Sri Lanka, just where all that coffee used to grow. And thus a new industry was born.

The British encountered the same problem with their tea estates as they had when they were growing coffee: labor. Growing tea requires intensive, back-breaking, patient labor, and the British were not willing to pay a lot to their workers. As a result, few Singhalese were willing to work on the estates. They considered it menial dirty work. Thus an intense labor shortage threatened to kill the tea industry before it really had a chance to take off.

At the time, the British controlled most of the Indian subcontinent. And by coincidence, southern India, today’s Tamil Nadu, was undergoing a drought of epic proportions, resulting in mass unemployment of farmers, mass starvation, and severe social displacement. Looking northwards from Sri Lanka, the British Estate owners saw the answer to their labor problem; they began to import landless, impoverished farmers from India.

There were three bonuses from the British viewpoint: surplus labor was being taken from India to Sri Lanka and put to good use. Second, many of these landless farmers were already familiar with plantation-style agricultural techniques and were willing to work for far less than the Singhalese. Third, the British had already had a long history in Tamil lands, and so were familiar with the language and culture.

Within a very short time, hundreds of thousands of families from southern India poured into the estate areas, and the tea business exploded. In fact to this day tea is the number one source of revenue for Sri Lanka.

However things did not turn out unicorns and rainbows for the Estate Tamils. The system of labor quickly degenerated into a form of legalized slavery and families became tied to their Estate similar to the way serfs were bound to their land during the Middle Ages. In some families, whole generations passed before anyone went more than a few miles from their Estate village.

This isolation, high up in the mountains of the tea estates, culturally and politically isolated Estate Tamils from the rest of the world. Over the next 150 years, until Sri Lankan independence, there were only a handful of Estate Tamil professionals, and no one to represent them in government or protect their interests. Culturally they became frozen in time and to this day speak a form of Tamil considered archaic in Tamil Nadu; even their religious practices are those of two centuries ago.

Estate Tamils were viewed as foreign “guest workers” and not in the least Sri Lankan, even by their Sri Lankan Tamil cousins. Everyone ignored them; few schools were built in Estate areas and there was little attempt to provide water, roads, electricity, or any of the so-called modern infrastructure. The Tamils existed in what could at best be described as benign neglect. The reality of course was one of unending labor with only the deepest poverty to show for it.

In the 1920s and 1930s, those few educated Estate Tamils who made it out of the Estate system began to try and organize themselves. The going was rough as the usual British reaction to any attempt at organizing labor (even in Britain) was violence. However, the British felt particularly vulnerable during the Great Depression; all tea pickers and processors were Estate Tamil, and thus represented a choke point in the industry. And then during WWII the British, having lost their entire East Asian Empire to the Japanese, wanted to make sure that the population of Sri Lanka remained friendly. The result was some small number of concessions to the Estate Tamils, and a reform of the tea industry to make it a little less repressive.

Estate Tamils took virtually no part in the Independence Movement of the 1940s; their isolation ensured that they never formed the political and social connections necessary for their participation. When Independence was achieved in 1948, there were no changes in the lives of the Estate Tamils, except that their British overlords were replaced by Singhalese one, and the Singhalese had always considered Estate Tamils to be foreign interlopers.

The new Singhalese majority governments began to enact a series of legislation designed to marginalize all Sri Lankan minorities; Singhalese was made the official language, Buddhism the state religion, etc., and resources were directed away from minority communities and to Singhalese areas. Many of these new laws and restrictions were the direct cause of the ongoing civil conflict between the Sri Lankan Tamils and the Singhalese government, but the reaction among the Estate Tamils was different. Like their Sri Lankan Tamil brothers, they began to organize politically, but instead of agitating for ethnic and religious rights, Estate Tamil groups, under the guise of tea estate based unions, fought for labor rights.

Early majoritarian governments were very hostile to any challenges made by the various minorities. While the government response given varied from group to group, they were almost universally repressive. In the case of the Estate Tamils, they were specifically and legally declared non-Sri Lankans (despite having lived in Sri Lanka for nearly 200 years) and policies were developed to coerce Estate Tamils into moving back to India, a homeland they had left two centuries ago and with which they were by now completely unfamiliar. Probably a third of the Estate Tamil population moved back to India; many are now tea pickers in Kerala Province!

Contrary to the expectations of the government, rather than meekly submitting, the various minority groups only became more active; the political and cultural groups that represented Sri Lankan Tamils became armed paramilitary rebel groups, which the LTTE eventually dominated, while the Estate Tamils joined the tea unions in droves and began to agitate for better living and work conditions.

For the tea unions, progress was slow. But incrementally, there began to be some change. Pay rates were raised, albeit from a deeply impoverished level to one of mere poverty. Some infrastructure programs were put in place, but perhaps most importantly in 1983 Sri Lankan Tamils were granted official citizenship. Once this happened, the unions began to field political candidates. So now, despite their small numbers, the Estate vote has become vital to the government, as the main parties are normally unable to win an outright parliamentary majority and so rely on coalition with smaller parties.

It is true that a large amount of this progress is due to the civil conflict. Successive governments have feared any link between the Estate Tamils and the Sri Lankan Tamil rebel movements. However given the deep prejudice of Sri Lankan Tamils against Estate Tamils, no such serious attempt was ever made on the part of the LTTE. This allowed the government to only offer the barest minimum concessions.

Daily life for the Estate Tamils is still very difficult; they have the lowest life expectancy of any community in Sri Lanka. They have the highest illiteracy rates and lowest income level. Most live in astonishingly abysmal housing. The vast majority still live extremely isolated lives, and are still subject to abuse from the Estate managers. So despite some progress, very little has changed from colonial times.

Tea is the single largest revenue source for Sri Lanka, and all of it is produced by Estate Tamils. Yet they only see a tiny fraction, maybe 1.5%, of those earnings spent in their areas. The average tea picker earns around 200 rupees (about $1.80) a day. (To give you an idea of the buying power of 200 rupees, a kilo of laundry detergent costs around 250 rupees.) Housing, which is provided by the Estates, is often more than a century old and almost never repaired or improved. The workers only have access to Estate-owned shops, which keeps many of them in a cycle of debt. Some managers keep their workers’ national ID cards (an illegal practice), thus preventing them from leaving their Estate villages. Social discrimination, especially among the Singhalese, is still full force; socially most Sri Lankans have never accepted Estate Tamils as being Sri Lankan. In other words, Estate Tamils today still suffer from what could easily be described as economic slavery.

Yet most Estate Tamils, even the ones who have escaped the Estate system, have little desire to leave Sri Lanka. This is their home; they have known no other for 200 years. They want civil rights, and a greater slice of the wealth they generate. But surprisingly, many of them want to be left alone in their Hill Country villages, to evolve and develop their own culture in the way they see fit. Many have no interest in integration with their oppressors; as one prominent Estate Tamil said, “We have suffered greatly under ‘peaceful co-existence.’ Don’t cheat us, don’t take advantage of us, but let us be in peace.”

Below are a few links to websites that discuss Estate Tamils. Ethnicity is a highly charged subject in Sri Lanka, and so finding neutral information can be difficult. The following are reasonably un-biased: