Abstract
Nearly seven years after the end of a 25-year civil war, historian Kumari Jayawardena and economist Rachel Kurian’s book draws our attention to an area of study on the margins of national debates—that of Sri Lanka’s plantations. Drawing on archival material and over 40 years of individual studies on labour and the plantations, both scholars present a critical analysis of power and protest in dynamics of class, patriarchy and ethnicity over 200 years. The book outlines seven interdisciplinary themes ranging from legacies of slavery and coercive labour regimes to manifestations of resistance, mobilisation and ethnic and labour formations and is divided into five parts and 23 chapters, making it an ambitious yet methodical undertaking.
Part I draws upon the legacies of slavery on the construction of plantation life and labour control. Most notable is the richness of archival material presented in chapter 4, ‘1001 Variations of Resistance’, reviving Jan Breman’s analysis of resistance in his Taming the Coolie Beast (1989), the ethnographic material of anthropologist E. Valentine Daniel and early newspaper illustrations as presented by archivist R.K. de Silva. Parts II and III examine more officially recognised forms of protest in the archive—namely from ‘outsiders’ within India and the British Crown and the rise of labour movements in and outside colonial Ceylon. In these two sections, both authors centre on the issue of class. From the 1930s formation of the Lanka Sama Samaja Party (LSSP) to the leftist engagements of outsiders, such as Mark Anthony Bracegirdle and Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay, the authors successfully demonstrate the ways in which class consciousness is not abstractive but rather performative. Further, we are reminded as readers that the plantations were never Erving Goffman’s ‘total institutions’ but rather, porous constructs made unstable by dissatisfaction and protest from their very inception. Parts IV and V bring the narrative of the plantation workers’ struggle for rights full circle against the backdrop of the formation of the Ceylon nation-state and the rise of political and ethnic tensions across the island in the latter half of the 20th century. The authors trace the origins of today’s plantation trade unions, explore more contemporary forms of development and highlight the leadership of key women in plantation labour movements. They conclude that while ‘much has been achieved in terms of democratic rights, some of the historic features of economic exploitation, social oppression, and gender discrimination remain’ (p. 319). Their conclusion reminds us that the struggle for rights is catalysed not only by strong leadership and mobilisation but also the necessary inclusion of the sector in national dialogues around the due recognition of minorities, women and workers’ rights and place in Sri Lanka.
Alongside Patrick Peebles’ The Plantation Tamils of Ceylon (2001), this book stands as one of the most in-depth and detailed accounts of trade unionism and labour within Sri Lanka’s plantation sector. The authors bring together class consciousness, ethnicity and workers’ struggles for their rights, a conceptual combining which has been largely unmanaged in plantation scholarship, a body of literature which tends to focus on one or the other or only the intertwining of class and ethnic identity formations.
While the book provides the above contributions, significant omissions due to methodological and disciplinary constraints remain. First, because both authors are working primarily out of English language or translated sources, key forms of struggle and leaders among Tamil plantation communities, which have been well documented in media and archival sources on the plantations, are unmentioned. For instance, the authors do not include the Working Women’s Front (WWF), the first women-led trade union registered in Sri Lanka in 2011, and while Tamil women leaders such as Meenachi Ammal and Mangalammal Masilamani are given brief mention, the key leadership of early women trade unionists such as Sivapakkiyam Kumaravelu, Periyakkal and Krishnammal are not, despite their contributions to raising class consciousness among Tamil women plantation workers during the first half of the 20th century. Centring on women and labour narratives of those individuals and movements well connected to Colombo and well represented in English language forms signals to a deeper concern with the linguistic elitism of Sri Lankan plantation historiography—namely the scholarly limitations of engaging largely English language archives to make claims about largely non-English represented practices and expressions of class, ethnicity and gender on the plantations.
Second, Jayawardena and Kurian make a claim for ‘multiple’ and ‘persistent’ patriarchies on the plantations but do not adequately engage questions of intersectionality and alternative feminist perspectives. In the text, patriarchy is ‘entrenched’ and pervasive to the point where readers may struggle to understand how to think about the possibility of women’s agency and selfhood alongside patriarchy. The case for multiple forms of patriarchal entrenchment makes it even more difficult to account for how women on the plantations speak and act on an everyday level—in their families, in their labour on and off the plantations and in civil society. For instance, the authors briefly mention migrant labour among women as a ‘horizontal shift in the form of exploitation’ (p. 318) but in my ethnographic research conducted among women migrant workers on the plantations (Jegathesan 2015) unskilled and domestic work does in fact carry prestige with real socio-economic value and consequences. Likewise, caste exclusion within the unions is briefly mentioned, but the authors do not explicitly discuss how caste consciousness manifests among younger generations of women through inter-ethnic marriages, education and migrant labour. This oversight encourages plantations scholars to reconsider the more ontological implications of recognising potentially divergent ways that women on the plantations value themselves and their work and the investments they make in their homes and lives.
In spite of these limitations, this book compels readers to seriously re-centre the demand for workers and women’s rights in the plantation sector and within the context of Sri Lanka’s post-war imaginary. Plantation and labour scholars of South Asia will find this collaborative endeavour timely as Sri Lanka and plantation sectors on a global level look ahead to uncertain political and economic futures.