Malaiyaha Tamils’ long march to equality in Sri Lanka

It's just after 6 am on 29 July, and the ordinarily quiet village of Talaimannar, on the small island of Mannar just off the northwest coast of Sri Lanka, is already alive with activity. The sun has just recently risen and the air is still cool. Inside St Lawrence Church, some are listening to the pastor. Others chat in front of the church's soft-orange façade, emblazoned in Tamil with words from the Gospel of John, 15:9: "Abide in my love." 

The crowd isn't here for a church service, but rather to set off on a journey 200 years in the making. Sometime around 1823, British colonial administrators began recruiting people from southern India to work as indentured labourers in what was then Ceylon. The labourers were brought over to build transportation systems and cultivate land in the hill country at the centre of the island, a region known as the Malaiyaham. This was territory the British had forcefully acquired after the 1818 Uva–Wellassa Rebellion, which saw Kandyan chieftains' revolt against the colonial administration soon after the Kingdom of Kandy was relinquished to the British Crown. The British especially saw an opportunity to scale up and appropriate local coffee production, already happening on a small scale, and needed a steady supply of workers to achieve this. While Ceylonese labourers helped clear land on the coffee estates, they refused to work on the estates themselves due to the low wages on offer. 

The British began to ferry labourers over from India by ship. The first of them made landfall at Talaimannar, before making a perilous trek of some 250 kilometres through forested land and into the hill country. Two hundred years later, their descendants, the Malaiyaha Tamils, have gathered to retrace the journey, walking from Talaimannar to Matale in Sri Lanka's Central Province over a period of two weeks. 

The walk is as much an act of protest as of remembrance. Among the demands being made by the Malaiyaha Tamil community are an acknowledgement of their history, struggles and contribution to Sri Lanka, the recognition of their distinct identity, a living wage, equal pay, land rights and parity of status for the Tamil language, access to government services, an equitable and inclusive electoral system, and affirmative action in healthcare and education. Malaiyaha Tamils are among the most marginalised communities in the country. In April, the World Bank noted that more than half of the estate workers were living below the poverty line of USD 3.65 a day. Malaiyaha Tamils also continue to suffer social discrimination based on caste, class, labour segmentation and ethnicity. 

After the pastor at St Lawrence's finishes his blessing, the crowd is organised into an orderly line. A number of clergymen from the organising team call out instructions. Christian non-profit organisations have historically worked with Malaiyaha Tamils on estates across the country, and are among those at the forefront of organising the march under the umbrella of the Maanbumigu Malaiyaha Makkal, a collective of civil-society groups and individuals either from or working with the Malaiyaha Tamil community. A series of awareness programmes were planned at each rest stop along the way. 

Alongside the Malaiyaha Tamils are several people from other communities marching in solidarity. Most are Tamils from Sri Lanka's Northern Province, distinct in history and identity from the Malaiyaha community, but there are also Sinhalese present, representatives of Sri Lanka's majority community, including two Buddhist monks. 

In total, around 60 people from the Central Province, where a large number of Malaiyaha Tamils live and work, have joined the walk for the first day. One of the eldest is the sprightly Santhiyagu Loganathan, a 66-year-old retired estate medical officer from Bogawantalawa, dressed smartly in a shirt and veshti. "Even though it's been 200 years since we came to the hill country, we still don't have any sort of identity," Loganathan says. "We still haven't been recognised as the Malaiyaha community. At least in this 200th year, we should get our identity, we should get our status, we should get the same rights and identity as all other communities. And that's why we've come to Talaimannar, to mark our footsteps on theirs, on the same path they walked."

The group poses with a banner for a photo, and then starts off, walking past the golden angels guarding the church's silver gates. 

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Many of those who migrated, primarily from what was then the Madras Presidency, were facing famine at home and belonged to the oppressed castes. The kanganis, the supervisors who recruited them, took advantage of their dire circumstances, promising a better, more prosperous future on the coffee plantations of Ceylon. 

Malar, a 36-year-old tea picker from Bogawantalawa attending the first day of the walk as part of a women's organisation, remembers hearing stories about the recruitment process. "When we were studying, our grandparents used to tell us that the white people brought our ancestors over from India by ship and on foot," she says. "The white people told them there was maasi and karuvaadu" – Maldive fish and dry fish – "on the plantations." Once they had been brought over, "the white people sent them to various areas and kept them like slaves."

Many of the Indian recruits died before reaching the plantations, collapsing from hunger or exhaustion on the journey. P D Millie, one of the first coffee planters in Ceylon, wrote in 1878 of how the Malaiyaha Tamils were treated in life and in death.   

These graves were dug hurriedly, without any proper tools, in a hard scorched-up ground, were very shallow and insufficient depth. The consequences were that jackals dug into them and fed on the corpses, sometimes even drawing them out of the graves, so that there might be seen scattered about bleached skulls and bones. It was even not unusual to see dying coolies and dead bodies, lying along roadside; during the onward journey the sick were frequently left behind, in order that the whole gang might hurry on to the estate as speedily as possible.

Millie recounted how families in India, told that their relative had died en-route, would cry out in "heart-rending" grief. These deaths, and the grieving for them, are intrinsic to the identity of Malaiyaha Tamils today. They observe a tradition known as kaatu soru – literally, "forest rice" – referring to the jungle treks of their ancestors. 

Loganathan says he believes only around 60 percent of people survived the journey. "When they came to Sri Lanka, to the hill country, cutting down forests to make roads, they put down a stone wherever someone died, as a symbol," he explains. "They thought that on their way back they would see the stone and be reminded to pay their respects and say prayers to the dead. They offered some of the rice they had brought with them and prayed at that spot. In the same way, today in the hill country, whenever someone dies at their last rites we cook this kaatu soru and offer it at the time of burial." 

At the end of the journey, those who survived were put into barracks-style accommodations known as line houses. Cramped and crowded, these generally comprised a single large room each, with a separate outdoor kitchen. On one estate in the hills of Nuwara Eliya district, a line house has been preserved as a museum, kept largely as it was when workers still lived in it. Besides displaying artefacts from the workers' lives – a chest to keep clothes, a religious shrine, cooking pots and a hammock – the museum also chronicles the journey of the first Malaiyaha Tamils. It also records how the plantations switched from growing coffee to tea by the mid-1870s after a rampant fungal disease wiped out coffee production. 

Along with the miserable living conditions and poverty wages came social hostility, discrimination and eventually political disenfranchisement. During colonial rule, both planters and government agents referred to Malaiyaha Tamils with the derogatory term "Malabar coolies". This was how they were identified in the census. 

In 1911, Malaiyaha Tamils constituted roughly 13 percent of Ceylon's population. Sri Lanka's most recent census, published in 2012, shows that they now comprise just above 4 percent of the general population. This lower figure could also be partly due to some Malaiyaha Tamils registering their status as Sri Lankan Tamil, often due to fear of being discriminated against. 

In 1931, the British administration promulgated the Donoughmore Constitution, which granted everyone in Ceylon the right to vote. This granting of universal franchise was not celebrated by everyone. Sinhalese leaders opposed giving Malaiyaha Tamils the right to vote, fearful that universal franchise might erode their own representation electorally. This resulted in more stringent conditions being put in place for Malaiyaha Tamils to qualify as Ceylonese citizens. The Tamil political leadership tried to push for equal parliamentary representation for the island's Sinhalese majority and various minorities, with 50 percent of seats going to each, but this proposal was eventually defeated, foreshadowing deeper polarisation between the Sinhalese and ethnic minorities. 

After Sri Lanka gained independence in 1948, the government passed the Ceylon Citizenship Act, which effectively rendered Malaiyaha Tamils stateless. This disenfranchisement was the result of several factors, including the economic depression of the 1930s, but the perceived transience of the Malaiyaha Tamils, still seen as "Indian Tamils" in Sri Lanka, remained key. 

In the following decades, some Malaiyaha Tamils left the estates to resettle in Sri Lanka's Northern Province, primarily in the areas of Vavuniya, Mullaitivu and Kilinochchi. But even here they were discriminated against, now by the resident Tamil population, who also viewed them as outsiders and looked down on them for being estate labourers. 

"They called us thottakattaan, or estate coolies, when we first came," says 66-year-old Janaki, a resident of Tharmapuram in Kilinochchi. "Because the way we speak and the way they speak is different, right? So they find us out that way. Even now they can work it out." 

In 1954, India and Sri Lanka signed the Nehru-Kotelawala Pact for the repatriation of Malaiyaha Tamils to India. This was not fully enforced due to disagreements on its implementation. But subsequent agreements, including the Sirimavo-Shastri Pact in 1964 and the Sirimavo-Gandhi Pact in 1974, led to some Malaiyaha Tamils being sent to India – some by force. The Black July violence in 1983, when Sinhalese mobs massacred Tamils, halted repatriations as the India-Sri Lanka relationship deteriorated.

Letchumy Velusamy Weerasingham, a human rights activist on the walk from Talaimannar, remembers being a little boy when one of his uncles was sent to India against his wishes, reportedly forced to leave by estate managers because he often spoke out against injustices. Weerasingham's mother was grief-stricken – she removed all her jewellery and sang the oppari, an ancient lament. Weerasingham's uncle was similarly distraught, and took a handful of earth with him to India, tied in a corner of his turban.

Such connection to soil was hugely symbolic – workers coming from India would bring a fistful of soil from the temple they worshipped at, which they would then worship in Sri Lanka, and they would take soil from Sri Lanka when they left, following the same practice. But the journey back was no simple homecoming: upon their return, Weerasingham recounts, Malaiyaha Tamils were referred to as "Ceylon Tamils" in India. 

Many Malaiyaha Tamils remained stateless until Malaiyaha Tamils were finally granted universal citizenship in Sri Lanka in 2003, 55 years after the Ceylon Citizenship Act. But even today, many in the community still face difficulties in obtaining basic documents like national identity cards. Selwadore Amarajothie, a 47-year-old estate worker on the march, says she had to make a trip to Colombo to get an identity card. The journey was incredibly challenging for her, with limited food, an inability to read or write and the expense of 18,000 Sri Lankan rupees – roughly USD 50. Her husband still hasn't been able to claim his pension as he has no birth certificate. Amarajothie says that hospitals have no records of his birth and redirect them to the estate office instead, which says it will look for the records but then goes silent. 

The ownership of the estates has changed numerous times. Controlled by agency houses run by professional managers at the time of independence, they came into state hands following nationalisation in the 1970s. After 1992, the state leased estate land to Regional Plantation Companies (RPCs), organised under the Planters Association of Ceylon. Many estates today are also privately owned. Despite living there for generations, and estates being transferred from owner to owner, the Malaiyaha Tamils have never been considered to have any claim to ownership of the land they have toiled on. The barriers to them receiving citizenship also ensured that they did not receive land rights.

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Video footage from the walk organised by Maanbumigu Malaiyaha Makkal. Among the demands being made by the Malaiyaha Tamil community are an acknowledgement of their history, struggles and contribution to Sri Lanka, the recognition of their distinct identity, a living wage, equal pay, land rights and parity of status for the Tamil language, access to government services, an equitable and inclusive electoral system, and affirmative action in healthcare and education. Video courtesy Sripuspanathan Thusikaran and Jeevan Ravindran

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Already a vulnerable community, Malaiyaha Tamils have been disproportionately impacted by Sri Lanka's current economic crisis. In May 2023, the World Food Programme reported that the estate sector remained among the most impacted by acute food insecurity in the country. "Instead of eating one roti, now we're in a position where we eat half and give the other half to the children," says 48-year-old tea picker Rangaraj Papathy, her voice breaking. "I can't afford to even buy one egg and give it to my children. Why is it like this?" 

The Central Bank of Sri Lanka's 2022 annual report on child malnutrition states that the estate sector is the "most vulnerable sector with the highest prevalence in stunting and underweight children under five years." The reason is largely that low wages make it impossible for families to afford food after recent price rises. This is despite workers on estates managed by RPCs finally securing a daily wage of 1000 Sri Lankan rupees in 2021 after years of protests. Already a low sum then, this translates to just around USD 3 today after the drastic devaluation of the currency. 

Papathy says she earns a monthly salary of around 30,000 rupees when tea leaves are in season. After estate deductions for food, pension contributions, amenities and festival bonuses, she is left with between 15,000 and 18,000 rupees. When there are fewer leaves to pluck, she has to manage on a monthly salary of less than 10,000 rupees. Where workers have taken loans from the estate or borrowed in food provisions, their salaries are even lower. Some are left with just a few hundred rupees at the end of the month, or even less. 

Compounding the issue, workers have been told by some RPCs, most of which are public limited companies, that they must pluck at least 18 kilogrammes of tea a day in order to earn the full daily wage. On privately owned estates, the situation is sometimes even worse, with some workers earning a daily wage of 750 rupees for targets of up to 30 kilogrammes – translating to as little as 25 rupees per kilogramme. These targets have proven very difficult for workers to reach, particularly with reduced tea-bush yields due to fertiliser shortages caused by the economic crisis – and so they are paid a per-kilo rate of 40 or 50 rupees instead. 

The low wages don't just impact food security. Many line houses on the estates, where workers still live, are in dilapidated condition, flooding during the regular rains and in some cases lacking toilets. As families expand, there is not enough space to accommodate them, leaving large numbers to sleep in one room. In some cases, families are left homeless and take to building makeshift huts on the estates or leave themselves completely at the mercy of the elements. The houses most workers' families live in are still owned by the estates, which are at liberty to evict them at any time.

"Even if we want to change something in our house, we have to ask for permission from the plantation," 25-year-old Sundaram Vinothsundar, a community activist, says. "That's the terrible situation we're in." He adds that there is no privacy in homes because so many people are packed into each line house. "That's the problem, everything is a problem. Honestly, we're just eating and existing, like animals – they're treating us like animals."

Workers also have to cope with punishing work conditions on the estates, sometimes with no access to restrooms or even a dry place to sit and eat their lunch. Leeches are commonplace. "When you pluck one tea leaf, three of them will climb up onto your leg," Papathy says. "If they bite you, then huge amounts of blood will flow. We have to keep picking them off and working."

Workers' exploitation is a central issue raised at each of the events that take place as the walk progresses. At an event in Vavuniya, one speaker takes to the stage and declares: "There is no difference between the leeches and the kanganis." Although no longer used as recruiters, kanganis continue to serve as supervisors on estates, and workers often accuse them of meting out harsh punishment for not meeting targets or taking too many breaks. "They both live off our blood. The kanganis are just leeches who wear trousers." 

In response to written questions on the conditions facing estate workers, the Planters Association of Ceylon, which represents the RPCs, stated that it is deeply committed to their safety and welfare. It added that the minimum wage of 1000 rupees a day on the estates was higher than the national minimum wage of 12,500 rupees per month, and higher than the minimum wages offered by 95 percent of the country's agriculture sector. Workers are also entitled to non-wage benefits such as maternity benefits and gratuity payments. 

The association stated that missing productivity targets does not disqualify workers from the minimum wage provided they have worked a full eight-hour day. Adjustments occur when a worker leaves the field early or does not pluck the "norm" – the average harvest the workers are able to achieve. The association added that on estates run by RPCs under its purview every household has been provided with water and over 95 percent of households have electricity connections, and a total of 135,000 individual toilets have been built to serve over 100,000 workers, in addition to field toilets. Since the RPCs are leasing the estates from the government, they have "no legal right" to divest title of the land or to authorise renovation of the line houses. Given that the cost of production for tea regularly outstrips the revenue earned from it, the association wrote, there is a need to transition to productivity-linked revenue-share models to allow for higher wages.

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The walk from Talaimannar is far from the first protest by the Malaiyaha Tamils. There is a long history of resistance on Sri Lanka's tea estates. In May 1941, Ramasamy Weerasamy and Iyan Perumal Velaithen, members of the All Ceylon Estate Workers' Union, were charged along with four others for the murder of the superintendent of the Stellenberg Estate in Pussellawa, George Pope, because he did not allow them to practise trade union rights. 

During the Second World War, workers went on strike to win the right to unionise, while estate management tried to thwart them. This strike was due in part to the growing influence of the leftist Lanka Sama Samaja party, which gained traction on the estates. The ensuing clash led to the first death of an estate worker – Govindan, on the Mul Oya estate – not far from where the Scot James Taylor first planted tea as a commercial crop in Ceylon. At the workers' museum in Nuwara Eliya hangs a list of Malaiyaha Tamils who died fighting for their rights; it records 39 deaths from 1940 to 1980. 

Strikes remain commonplace across estates today, with workers protesting unfair productivity targets and failures to provide pension payments, among other issues. However, the strikes do not always have the support of trade unions, which are largely responsible for representing the workers, and each day of work missed in a strike means a precious day's wage is forfeited – something especially painful amid the economic crisis. 

The estate sector is represented by some six trade unions. Two of the largest, the Ceylon Workers' Congress and the National Union of Workers, double up as political parties, a phenomenon unique to the hill country in Sri Lanka. This means the unions attempt to win workers' votes while workers also pay them monthly membership fees, and the unions deal with estate managers on the workers' behalf. Several workers have grown disillusioned with politics after seeing relatively few changes from this system.

"We mostly trust in the politicians, don't we?" Malar, from Bogawantalawa, says. "They come when it's time for the elections and say I'll do this for you, I'll do that for you, and get our votes." But then they do nothing until the next election comes around. "We're dependent on others for our survival, that's the mistake we make. That's why we haven't been able to progress."

Still largely tied to the estates, colonial creations designed to exploit rather than uplift workers, Malaiyaha Tamils have limited access to education and other jobs. If they do leave the estates, many of them seek employment as domestic workers or in shops and restaurants. The economic crisis has led to higher numbers of women leaving small children behind in search of employment as domestic workers in the Gulf states, where they are often subject to exploitation. 

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There is an element of hope in the air as the march proceeds into its third day, crossing a bridge from Mannar Island, with Talaimannar on its far side, onto the Sri Lankan mainland. Marchers beat a wooden drum and sing Tamil film songs, and a priest accompanies them on the flute. Along the way, locals have organised refreshments at rest stops, showing their support. The leaders of the march are garlanded and the marchers hand out flyers as they walk — on one occasion running to give a flyer to an auto-rickshaw driver as he speeds by. 

Each day, a small but steady trickle of people joins the walk. There are Catholic youths from the local church association. There are Muslim women from Mullaitivu, who say they have joined after being educated on the difficulties of the community by Malaiyaha Tamils who migrated to the North from the estates. With each new visitor, camaraderie seems to grow among the crowd, who sing and walk together. 

"It's amazing, isn't it," Pradeep, an estate worker from Bogawantalawa, says. "We've all come together with no thought of religion or caste. We didn't expect this when we came here. We've left our relatives to come here, but only after coming did we realise how many relatives we've got. I'm tearing up just thinking about it."

Once the walk is over, Papathy knows, she will have to return to her estate, where the days will be long and punishing with little respite. Sitting in front of a church in Pesalai, where the march had halted at the end of the first day, she holds out her hands. There are dark brown marks on her fingers, contrasting with the pinkish hue of her palms. "Our hands are our knives," she says, describing the work of picking tea. She points to where a deep groove usually appears, the result of countless hours of plucking. "It gets deeper and deeper and goes this far down. Now it's been four or five days since I came here, so it's closed up and it looks fine, and you can't see it properly." Papathy explains that "if you just pluck any which way, then you get everything – twigs, leaves and all. We pluck beautifully, from side to side. That's how we get wounds from the tea leaves." 

Earlier that day, as the sun began to beat down, a group of tea pickers from Bogawantalawa marched holding up a banner and singing a painful song: 

ஆடாமல் ஆடுறோம் ஆட்டுறாங்க ஆடுறோம்,
வோட்டு போட்ட பின்னாலும் ஓயாமல் ஆடுறோம்.

We are puppets being made to dance,

Even after voting, we're dancing non-stop.

காலையில வேலை தேடி மாலையிலே மாரடிச்சு,
பாடையில போற வரை அல்லாடுறோம்.

We go looking for work in the morning and by evening we can't take it any more,

We suffer miserably until we get to the funeral pyre.

On the third day, sitting on a plastic chair at a church in Murunkan, where the group is resting after walking 25 kilometres, Arumugam Dharmaraj from Bogawantalawa shares some disturbing news. "Yesterday, one woman was really struggling to pick 25 kilos of tea leaves, and she didn't realise what was happening to her and fainted, fell down and died," he says. "According to the information we got, her body still hasn't been released from the hospital. I'm here, but this happened in our area, and nobody knows what happened to her." 

Dharmaraj continues his lament: "We only have ourselves for protection, we don't have any protection around us. Whatever happens to us, we survive because of the tea tree, and we die because of the tea tree, and we live because of it too. That's our driving force. The tea tree gives us everything, and we die as one with the tree and one with the soil."

The songs of the women continue to echo:

அந்த தேயிலை சாயத்தில ஓடுதடி நம்ம ரத்தம்

From the tea that you drink, it's our blood that flows.