Amali Philips (Panel Chair): Unequal Citizens: Women’s Experiences of Gender and Culture in Sri Lanka’s Tea Estates
The ethnic, economic, and political marginalization of Sri Lanka’s estate Tamils who are the descendants of 19th and 20th century labour migrants from the mainly Tamil districts of south India have been the subject of scholarly writings and commentaries. The political rhetoric accompanying the denial of citizenship to the estate Tamils after Sri Lanka gained independence from British rule in 1948 ignored the contributions of the estate Tamils to the plantation economy, which, until recently, was the most dominant sector in the production of national income in the country. The long simmering citizenship issue was finally resolved with the Grant of Citizenship to Persons of Indian Origin Act, No. 35 of 2003 which bestowed citizenship on the Tamils who had not been absorbed by earlier agreements between Sri Lanka and India beginning in the 1960s.
My purpose in this paper is to examine the implications of legal citizenship for estate Tamil women who constitute over 50% of the estate labour force and to highlight the gap between the concept of legal citizenship and the practice of citizenship in light of the gender experiences of estate Tamil women who are doubly marginalized because of their ethnicity and gender. While estate Tamil women make substantial economic contributions to plantation production and family well-being, cultural ideologies of gender hinder their participation as ‘full citizens’ – defined as involving rights, responsibilities, entitlements and agency. Using current perspectives on gender and citizenship, the almost universal incongruities between individual rights and cultural rights in other South-Asian settings, and Sri Lanka’s constitutional and legal provisions relating to gender equality as a backdrop, I will argue that without the empowerment and agency of marginalized citizens such as women in the plantations, legal citizenship will remain a concept and not a reality for women in the plantations.
Biographical Statement:
Amali Philips is a lecturer in social and cultural anthropology at Wilfrid Laurier University. Her research interests include kinship and marriage, social stratification, gender and ethnicity, dowry and women’s entitlements, gender and citizenship and multiculturalism. Her publications include: “Gendering Colour: Identity, Femininity and Marriage in Kerala,” in Anthropologica. 46:2 (2004); “Stridhanam: Rethinking Dowry, Inheritance and Women’s Resistance among the Syrian Christians of Kerala,” in Anthropologica, 45: 2 (2003); “The Kinship,Marriage and Gender Experiences of Tamil Women in Sri Lanka’s Tea Plantations,” in Contributions to Indian Sociology, 39:1 (2005); “Rethinking culture and development: marriage and gender among tea plantations workers in Sri Lanka,” in Gender and Development.11: 2 (2003) and “The Dilemmas of Identity Construction: Gender, Space and Ethnicity among the Estate Tamils”, R. Philips (ed), Sri Lanka: Global Challenges and National Crises. Proceedings of the Hector Abhayavardhana Felicitation Symposium (Social Science Association, 2001. She has a forthcoming paper on: “Multiculturalism and Its Discontents: Personal laws, Women’s Rights and Cultural Rights” (Anthropologica).
