Mythri Jegathesan: Articulating Life Choices and Attributing Value among Hill Country Tamil Women in Sri Lanka
Hill Country Tamils are often forgotten in Sri Lanka’s discourse on minority rights and have historically lived beyond the margins of national and international concern. Self-described as araciyal anaathaikal (“political orphans”), this community lacks consistent forms of representation that can adequately address their marginalized pasts and presents. Furthermore, the ongoing economic crisis and current post-conflict disregard of past traumas has left this minority population with few viable opportunities for sustained socioeconomic mobility and truncated forms of integration into Sri Lanka’s larger national communities. Given the current state of political exclusion, Hill Country Tamils are uncertain as to the best ways to secure a better life and must make decisions, which are oriented to fixed pasts and open futures.
Within this community, Tamil women on tea estates experience higher degrees of marginality due to historically rooted forms of patriarchy and given roles and responsibilities in their residential and labor settings. This paper will explore the pragmatic choices and present modes of security afforded to female Hill Country Tamil tea estate workers and residents. How do Tamil women on the plantations articulate life choices in relation to past and present states of marginality and inequality? How are necessary desires of socioeconomic security and gendered obligations of family and work circulated and perceived by women and the communities to which they are members? Based on ethnographic research carried out among Hill Country Tamil communities living on tea estates, this paper will focus on two categories of women—retired workers residing with children and unwed workers on the estate or in urban settings. The paper will address the ways in which these women and various communities (kin, residential, labor, civil, and nation) attribute value to their lives and perceive their pasts and presents in relation to gender inequalities, political exclusion, and marginality.
Biographical Statement :
Mythri Jegathesan is currently a doctoral candidate in the Department of Anthropology at Columbia University. Her research interests include plantation laborer communities; urban migration and foreign remittances; gender and age dynamics; NGOs and development in Sri Lanka; semeiotics and pragmatism; subaltern group life; political representation, citizenship, and minority rights (in British Ceylon and postcolonial Ceylon and Sri Lanka). Her dissertation is currently entitled, “Plantation Life and the Politics of Development: Sustaining Community among Hill Country Tamil Tea Estate Workers in Central Sri Lanka.”
