Dr Mythri Jegathesan (Santa Clara University)
Plots beyond Malaiyakam: in search of land and livelihood in Sri Lanka’s Northern Province
This talk examines how Northern Malaiyaka (“Hill Country”) Tamils build home and pursue livelihood in Sri Lanka’s Northern Province after the country’s civil war. Using evidence from ethnographic interviews, home visits, and archival research, I explore who and what forms of life and work sustain the plantation’s valuation of labor and its exclusionary market logics beyond its material and ecological boundaries. Northern Malaiyaka Tamils, a minority community in Sri Lanka, claims ancestral and ongoing kinship ties to the country’s South-Central tea and rubber plantations. Over three decades, roughly between 1956 to 1986, they migrated to Northern Province from the South-Central plantation areas and settled in search of land and livelihood off the plantation. During those years, they built lives for themselves while experiencing caste discrimination, ethnic violence due to the civil war, and multiple iterations of displacement. After the war ended in 2009, they gradually resettled on their lands from 2010 onwards but continue experience land, livelihood, and water insecurity in the face of militarization and neoliberal development schemes. This paper asks how what is interpreted as “freedom” in the plantation’s market produces intermediary forms of labor, capital and life relations in Sri Lanka. In doing so, I argue that Sri Lanka’s plantation’s logics present Northern Hill Country Tamils systemic and everyday challenges for their desires for cooperative action and distributive justice.
On Zoom, by invitation only.