Women Workers In The Sri Lanka Plantation Sector

Beyond nostalgic tea industry ads romanticizing colonial Ceylon and the impoverished conditions that beleaguer Tamil tea workers are the stories of the women, men, and children who have built their families and lives in line houses on tea plantations since the nineteenth century. The tea industry’s economic crisis and Sri Lanka's twenty-six year long civil war have ushered in changes to life and work on the plantations, where family members now migrate from plucking tea to performing domestic work in the capital city of Colombo or farther afield in the Middle East. Using feminist ethnographic methods in research that spans the transitional time between 2008 and 2017, Mythri Jegathesan presents the lived experience of these women and men working in agricultural, migrant, and intimate labor sectors. In Tea and Solidarity, Jegathesan seeks to expand anthropological understandings of dispossession, drawing attention to the political significance of gender as a key feature in investment and place making in Sri Lanka specifically, and South Asia more broadly. This vivid and engaging ethnography sheds light on an otherwise marginalized and often invisible minority whose labor and collective heritage of dispossession as “coolies” in colonial Ceylon are central to Sri Lanka’s global recognition, economic growth, and history as a postcolonial nation.

This pioneering collection of essays brings together a description and analysis of women workers and the socio-economic systems of plantations world-wide. The plantation remains a formidable force in many areas of the world and new trends towards tree farming call for further examination of its agriculture. Women have, in the past, constituted a considerable precentage of the work force in this milieu, and continue to do so.Using specific case studies of historical and contemporary plantations, an account is given of the history of female labour, focusing on the colonial and post-colonial eras. The essays examine reasons for women's degraded status and emphasize, in particular, issues relating to migrant workers.The gradual move away from traditional family roles is, to some extent, reflected in variations in the position of the female plantation worker. However, where inequalities in class and status continue to characterize plantation life, capitalist and patriarchal control prevails.Both chilling and bracing, the sufferings of plantation labourers may seem remote to most of us, but they are still very much part of the contemporary world. Providing a close insight into the lives of the female protagonists, these essays have given an opportunity for their stories to be heard.

Study conducted on Kalutara District in 1992.