BY Sunera Bandara Courtesy The Morning

The Madras famine of 1867, when the British empire failed to positively intervene during a long and destructive drought, while also attempting to cut back on welfare costs, bears the hallmark of a most noteworthy and tragic colonial failure to be remembered rather than the celebration of 200 years of Ceylon tea.

The famine made the rounds destroying agriculture, the lifestyle and numerous lives. Tamils situated there found themselves ferried abroad to the Island of Ceylon in the hopes of reclaiming what they had lost in Madras. Think the American dream – except, the new frontier is really now just a deceptive ad hiding further abuses. Lawyers today reading this would probably scratch their heads thinking about the possible contractual issues that may arise. Bad faith agreements signed in the melting panic of a seismic demographic shift as people strove simply to survive. The given conditions being absolutely scarce resources, cannibalism and the detritus of dead bodies whose stench rose up endlessly in the air. Eight million dead and counting still to this day and British author William Digby quips in his ‘The Famine Campaign in Southern India: Madras and Bombay Presidencies and the Province of Mysore, 1876–1878, Volume II’ to former Bombay Governor Richard Temple that one could not possibly boast of the great success of a relief programme when so many had to die to achieve its success. There is in fact no more obvious truth than the pillage and waste of an entire land swathe to make way for profits being a failure – it is a joke to assume the opposite.

Coolies

Agents there would sell to the locals who they deemed ‘coolies’ the lifestyle of a promising career path and then sell them into a lifetime of indentured servitude; broken backs, draconian punishment and disenchantment. The Indian Tamils never left the plantation and only escaped the death and drudgery of British slavery in India by thin hair. Instead, they found nightmares down the Straits via the boats that took them there. Carrying with them the dream of their future success, the Indian Tamil migrants in Ceylon of about 320,000 in 1881, after the famine having increased from 203,000 in 1871, is a big leap with all things considered. The famine had brought about a massacre with horror stories of travellers encountering the stench of corpses, children watching their parents rot and cannibalism on the rise.

The ‘coolies’ as referred to by the British agents would become the first generation of plantation workers in Ceylon, given indentured lives by the very same agents acting on behalf of imperial interests. The only stark irony, that despite the legacy of abolitionists having succeeded in ending the institution of slavery in 1943 in India, it was constituted into the form of indentured servitude – something quite different to its modern counterpart described as jail time. The kanganis, agents who procured labourers to become indentured serfs, were known to trick or kidnap indigent and landless labourers – 150 were taken from Thanjavur and dubbed the ‘innocent victims of a new system of slavery’. The labourers as a result faced five years of contractual servitude. Liable to forfeiture of their wages or imprisonment due to either ‘insolence’ or ‘negligence’. Workers were often put behind bars or had menial wages stripped from them on minimal and petty pretext. ‘Karumbu Thottathile’, a song by Tamil poet C. Subramaniyan/Subramania Bharathi regarding the plight of Tamils exported as plantation workers, evokes this detrimental state of degrading conditions that the workers of the time had to suffer through. The song is haunting and it turns out a strikingly tearful image of a suffering that never ends.

Opportunism

It was sheer opportunism for the British. We can also look at the story of former Ceylonese Prime Minister D.S. Senanayake – his own strategy involved trying to distinguish between Indian Tamils and Sri Lankan Tamils through the use of the Citizenship Act of 1948. Former Ceylonese Prime Minister S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike and Founder and Leader of the Illankai Tamil Arasu Kachchi and the Tamil United Liberation Front, S.J.V. Chelvanayakam were not shy to use this in their ploy for politics: Bandaranaike wanted an ethno-nationalist State and Chelvanayakam followed suit with his own strategy. Did Chelvanayakam want an ethno-nationalist State? He was a Tamil. He did not want the workers voting for the non-Vellalas/bourgeois. This was an act that brought two divergent nationalist ideologies to one front against the Left wing movement in Ceylon. The Tamils shunted back and forth between one land and another were now not only displaced but again unwanted – pawns of another game.

Two hundred years of Ceylon tea, yet, we have not come to terms with this level of atrocity. When will the empires of today slowly look back on the dust that they have cast over so many lives? No apology regarding the dividends received with the intention of cutting costs: ‘We shall need helping ourselves,’ says a director at a general meeting regarding Madras when faced with the idea that they may need to assist. Relief programme? More like a slow torture method devised by the insane.

Could we genuinely say that the Indian Tamil workers, now stuck between India and Sri Lanka had ever intended such an outcome? Was it but as innocent and simple as writing on a dotted line your dreams, hopes and fears away so that once you are collected, you may breathe fresh air again amongst companions of your youth? If they had known that it would have been this harsh, this troubling to both psychology and pride – would they still have gone down the Palk Strait to the Island of Ceylon (or the teardrop of the Indian Ocean)?

New face of slavery

Slavery changes its mask, over centuries, confusing each and every one of us through deception – till all of it becomes a normalised setting, where tears shed on the ground of a land that is not yours empties you of the last bit of blood you had to fight to get away from whatever you ran from. Such is the sentiment and such is the nature of Sri Lanka today that when we find ourselves celebrating (savouring a sip from) 200 years of Ceylon tea, it would take only the most hardened of hearts to not see past the entrenched symbolism of that handshake. Tea for 200 years? What about slavery for more? The Rubens at the Palace overlooking the Buckingham Palace sell a pot of Ceylon tea for Sterling Pounds 500 while workers in the Brunswick Estate in the highlands where that tea originates and elsewhere in the Island are yet to be guaranteed a daily wage of Rs. 1,000.

Colonisation still is a reality, even today, and we are reminded of the consequences of slavery by the 200 year handshake: of a Ceylon still conquered by its love for its master. Tea for 200 years represents the symbolic consequence of a handshake gone wrong. And, as our sympathies in life lie with the most luxuriant of activities, we will always forget that on the soil of the plantations from which tea grew, so did the blood, sweat and tears of men and women who travelled from so far so long to glimpse perhaps a better future. Slavery was no choice then, but then it had become so – sign the dotted line, the kangani would say: perhaps he would say smiling, there may be a cup of tea when you get there. They would sign away looking back on their lands, ravaged by plague, death, famine and rumours that if they stayed there they too would end up like the rest. And, getting on a boat, they would refuse to look back. The fields that they had tilled now were gone, as were their children and the neighbours they called friends. Emboldened by the hope of a new vision, they looked forward to a small Island that lay like a teardrop on the horizon. The rest is the history of a world obsessed with better promises, but never keeping them.

Oftentimes, I hear of the infamous ‘white saviour complex’ – of men and women travelling to third world countries with charitable interests and ways of making the locals feel better about themselves by giving money and then disappearing. Oftentimes, you would hear about these projects rising up out of nowhere and other times you would hear about gigantic projects creating jobs for many. But, the same attitudes remain, and we still celebrate through ignorance the stupid and petty things rather than the pain. I do not wish for tea anymore, but choice – the world gets darker and there still lies at the bottom of my teacup the spilt blood of so many, rather than so few.

(The writer is a law graduate with interests in international humanitarian law, current affairs, geopolitics, investigative journalism, and documentary filmmaking.)

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(The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author, and do not necessarily reflect those of this publication.)