Jegathesan, Mythri. Tea and Solidarity; Tamil Women and Work in Postwar Sri Lanka, 2019. ISBN: 9780295745671. Pages 288.
I used to travel to Talawakelle once or twice a year as it was my father’s hometown. As a youngster, these trips were always exciting. Aside from the grandparents’ affection, the panoramic view of mountains and tea estates, the chilly weather, and jaggary palms made me happy.
The tea-plucking women always caught my eye. Although I smiled at them, I was never inquisitive enough to speak to them. Because, even as a child, I sensed an unspoken ‘othering’ of this community.
Affectively, the tea-plucking woman was not one of ‘us’. However, they looked colourful, exotic, and picturesque. Without these women, the tea estates appeared deserted.
Jegathesan’s book made me nostalgic for those days, as if I could travel back in time and speak to those women whose voices I never heard. The book consists of seven chapters – Productive Alternatives; Unfixing Language and Landscape; Living the Wage; Building Home; From the Womb to the Tomb; Dignity and Shame; and Contingent Solidarities.
Apart from the seven main chapters, the book has an introduction – Unbecoming Labour - and a Conclusion. Each chapter starts with the story of a woman from the community. Unlike many studies in which the author is prominent and the people are reduced to mere research subjects, this book comes across as a voice of the community of women in Sri Lankan estates, who are seldom heard from or talked about. These women have names; Letchumi, Sadha, and Sellamma.
Uttering the truths
Successive Governments, communities, bureaucratic systems and other oppressive structures have silenced the hill country labouring women for centuries.
The book, Tea and Solidarity: Tamil Women and Work in Postwar Sri Lanka offers a voice for these women and utters the unspoken truths of the Sri Lankan tea industry from the perspective of tea-plucking women. Mythri Jegathesan, the author, attempts to perceive the world that is seen and experienced through the eyes of plantation women. She maps out not only women’s hardships, but on the contrary, their desires and dreams as well.
Feminist and decolonising methods
The book adds to the growing corpus of literature on exploitation and inequality in tea supply chains. The text, however, is far from that the usual academic discourse. The author is not the voice of the hill country Tamils, but only the writer of those voices. She goes back and forth in time; she navigates through history, she listens to untold stories from the colonial times, unpacks them, converses with Sellamma and Letchumi in the present, walks in the same footpaths with them, dines with them in their line rooms, and takes part in their celebrations. The people do not become mere characters of her intellectual journey, but rather, she becomes a part of theirs.
The author challenges the fabrication of ‘cultural anthropology’, which ‘was built on a predominantly white, cisgender, male-dominated canon’ and proposes a feminist and decolonial method to address these lapses.
British planters and officials never considered the hill country Tamils to be ‘humans’. Instead, they regarded them as ‘a labour commodity instrumental to the industry’s success. The English-speaking estate superintendent assistants had a pocket Tamil language guide; “Iṅgē Vā!”; or, ‘The Sinna Durai’s Pocket Tamil Guide’.
The planters and the authorities saw the hill country Tamils as a ‘commodity or a ‘natural labour’ force that can be controlled through the spoken Tamil language.
By doing so, the planters attempted to silence the estate community. Given the fact that the English-speaking superintendent assistants learned Tamil, they were never able to completely reduce the community to silence.
Belonging
The book explores the idea of home and belonging. As the ancestors of the hill country Tamil workers migrated from South India, Governments since Independence have been hesitant to recognise them as full citizens of the nation.
At the same time, due to their being ‘untouchables’, the workers are at the bottom rungs of the social ladder. These workers were ‘coolies’ according to the colonial terminology, but not enslaved people. As a result, the abolition of slavery had little impact on uplifting these Tamil workers’ social-economic and political positions.
Desires and dreams
The author uses various communication methods in her work: she listens, speaks, engages, and participates. In some sections, she has traced the workers’ desires by drawing from some workshops where the workers were invited to sketch their desires. In response, they illustrated their desires and dreams.
The author delves deeply into these expressions to explore the aspirations and desires of the community. The workers’ desires transcend the planters’ or regimes’ belief that the worker is merely a matter of “natural labour” and a tool in the profit-making tea business.
In the opening chapter, Jegathesan addresses the violence of language in framing the community. In her quest towards learning about the community, she searches for a language to articulate her findings.
The book refuses to see Tamil workers as ‘victims’ of repressive systems such as that of planters, other communities, and successive Governments. Instead, Jegathesan regards persons as self-contained human beings with desires and ambitions.
Unbecoming
Pursuing their aspirations and desires for dignity, hill country Tamils are in a never-ending process of unbecoming. They want to break free from the shackles of their ‘coolie’ labour. They want to be full citizens with a regular postal address and an identity other than that of a ‘coolie’.
Their ambitions include becoming financiers, medical professionals and teachers. Contrary to the hegemonic belief popularly touted in the country, hill country Tamils are unwilling to sweat in the plantations, where their forefathers toiled from womb to tomb.
Anushka Kahandagamage is a Doctoral Candidate in the School of Social Sciences, University of Otago.