by Sivamohan Sumathy
And I wish to speak of a poet here. Kurinjith Thennavan is an auto-didact. He did not learn to become a writer in our schools or university. He is a worker. He was shut out of our free education mandate even as he and others like him were enabling it. He was not celebrated as a poet of Sri Lanka during his life time, and is little known outside of a small circle of the Tamil literati and political actors. In concluding with two of this poems (in translation), I offer a reading of our history that in its undoing can help us forge a shared vision of social and political emancipation.
In the year 2023, we celebrated 75 years of our independence as a country. As we broke ties with Britain, and its imperiality, we struggled to find our feet under the postcolonial sun. Much of our postcolonial history has been a history of deep-seated violence of the social structures, and the violence of the repressive state apparatus. The colonial haunts our present in debilitating ways, not the least in the neo colonial, neo liberal imperialism of the global north, renamed as globalization, masking the pernicious nature of investment capitalism and exploitation of the resources of the global south, including that of the labour.
Today, we are in the midst of an unprecedented economic slump that promises to get worse in 2024. We also witness to the steady erosion of the rights and welfare of the vast majority of the people, besieged by rising prices and dwindling social welfare programmes. Our economy has become increasingly fragile, heavily reliant on the labour of working-class women, whose rights are being steadily eroded.
The year 2023 saw another milestone, going far back into our colonial history. 200 years ago, in 1823, land was allocated for the first large scale coffee plantation in the hill country. This was followed by the steady migration of Tamil speaking workers from South India who came over as indentured labour to work first in the coffee plantations and then the tea plantations. The trickle of workers in the early years expanded to hundreds of thousands over decades. The industry boomed and came to define Ceylon, as a major producer and exporter of tea. But there is also the history of the worker and the community that needs to be reckoned with.
The history of the tea industry and the history of the estate worker and the community are deeply intertwined, and it is a history of place, displacements, and strife. The dis/placements the community undergoes in colonial times continues into postcoloniality. In a series of acts from 1948-49, roughly a million people of the upcountry plantation community and their relatives elsewhere were disenfranchised. The upcountry plantation people, today, widely named and self-named as Malaiyaha Tamils, became a large and concentrated workforce, earning, until the mid-1970s, 56% of the foreign exchange for the country, but toiling without rights. They were a people with a home, but without a state.
My entry into the question of Malaiyaham and education pivots on questions concerning a) how we understand our history, the twin history of 75 years of independence, and 200 years of the plantation industry, built on the labour of a disenfranchised community b) how we bring the two into a relationship that gives us certain answers toward educational endeavours and c) how through that endeavour we may initiate a discussion on our pedagogical practices, what our priorities in education could be, and how we face the challenges brought on by competing demands made on educational practices; on the one hand, the demands of the market place and injunctions guided by World Bank directives for instance and, on the other, the need for a transformative pedagogy.
Education and Malaiyaham
We may feel that there is nothing much to show for our 75-year-old history. Yet in the bleakness of these times, it is important to underscore two salutary developments in our civic lives that have come to play a significant role in the historical trajectories of the state: Free Education, and free healthcare provision. Yet, free education heralded as a cohesive and comprehensive state policy, empowering ordinary people and giving them a greater share in the social and political life of democracy was tragically denied to the Malaiyaha community. Even on independence, a version of the Rural Schools Ordinance of 1907, where the companies were required to provide primary level schooling through estate schools, continued to be the mechanism for this community. The Kannangara report of 1943 quite tellingly left them out of its nation building programme. Angela Little traces the lineage of the educational policy impacting the Malaiyaha people in her detailed work. According to her, the immediately preceding colonial period, from 1905-47 saw more dynamism in estate schooling than the first phase of reforms in independent Ceylon from 1947-1977. From the mid-1970s onwards, estate schools were taken over by the state system, and set the Malaiyaha community on the path toward integration. In the mid ’80s, moves were made to increase the number of Tamil medium teachers in the central hill areas, with the establishment of teacher training colleges and related initiatives.
Nevertheless, as scholars and activists have noted, estate schools continued to receive second class treatment. They continue to lack basic facilities. Outside of the central areas in the central province, many estate born children were compelled to study in Sinhala, often to their detriment. The twin features of citizenship or its absence thereof and economic disempowerment shape the nature of the community’s integration into the national apparatus of education. Until 2003, when universal franchise was extended to the people of ’Recent Indian Origin’ there was no avenue for them to gain admission to the university system and access the much-hallowed provision of free higher education. Today, education is considered the best bid for social mobility for the community. We see increasing numbers of the children of estate workers entering the universities. This is our history of free education.
English Breakfast Tea: toward a programme of transformative educational practice
A transformative educational practice needs to address the fundamental concerns of a large number of people who are being pushed out of education by the onslaught of neo liberal change. In advancing a position on how we may engage with these questions and concerns, I plot a path for a series of disruptive interventions in the discourse of our history. We may begin with the history of the Malaiyaham and its marginal status in our history and the history of tea, so pivotal to our economy and to the imagination of who we are as a country.
Here is a sketchy mapping. ‘English Breakfast Tea’ can be widely found in the global market place and blandly announces the beverage’s colonial provenance. Colonialism and capitalism, twin projects of global imperialism, are normalized here in its global routing on international flights, airports or conferences. Or it could be the branding of an exclusive elitism, as one witnesses in an intriguing advert of a few years back, adorning the highways of our travel in Sri Lanka: ‘Mlesna, Naturally the Best.’ This advert normalizes class and capital as exclusive and as natural. In the neo liberal climate of our higher educational institutes, we are being asked to set our sights on capitalist development. We are told, like the branding of Mlesna’s tea, capitalist production is normal, natural, and the most beneficial to us, the consumer, reader and a privileged few.
Two Leaves….
But there is nothing miraculous about tea nor is it natural. It is set deep in a bloody history of dispossession. In a deconstructive reading of this advert, an exercise I often set students in the classroom, we are confronted with the erasures embedded in the sign of tea as a miraculously natural consumer product. The erasure is that of the labour of the worker who toils and whose citizenship status is taken away from her. Shuttling between the celebration of tea as a sign of capitalist development and consumerism, and the disruption of that ideological understanding, I turn away from seeing tea as a consumer product, and instead, think of it as a sign of labour: the Kolunthu – two leaves and a bud. It is the sign of the producer and it speaks of the poet.
And I wish to speak of a poet here. Kurinjith Thennavan is an auto-didact. He did not learn to become a writer in our schools or university. He is a worker. He was shut out of our free education mandate even as he and others like him were enabling it. He was not celebrated as a poet of Sri Lanka during his life time, and is little known outside of a small circle of the Tamil literati and political actors. In concluding with two of this poems (in translation), I offer a reading of our history that in its undoing can help us forge a shared vision of social and political emancipation.
Dew
Dew drops
Are the sweat tears shed by
The earth’s young virgin body
Crushed by the Giant,
In Night’s violent embrace.
Revolution
The buds open,
flower, then,
fall to the ground,
from the tea bushes.
withered and burnt,
In vain.
Do we live our lives in vain?
No,
When the fat belly
Of Capital, bloated with
Sucking on our labour,
Is ripped
open,
We are born,
Blood-drenched
Blossoms.
