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The land of hills and tea
Highlights
The hill country looked small and compliant. Until 1852, no one knew what to do with this overgrown end of the Loolecondera Estate.
John Gimlette’s ‘Elephant Complex’ is an enthralling snapshot of the soul of Sri Lanka
The hill country looked small and compliant. Until 1852, no one knew what to do with this overgrown end of the Loolecondera Estate.
But then a gigantic bearded Scotsman appeared, ready, it seemed, to tear out the forest. Little is known about James Taylor, except that he weighed 246 lb and that his men called him samydor, or the master god. His chimney is all that remains of his cabin, and everything else has rotted away. It was, however, an uncomplicated life without wives, neighbours or churches. For forty years, he lived and worked by this hearth, growing ever more gigantic. When he eventually died, it took twenty-four men to carry him down to Kandy.
Since then, the saplings he planted have never stopped spreading. By 1940, there were over 1,200 tea estates, containing up to four million bushes each. The leaves they produced would transform Ceylon’s economy and make it the world’s greatest exporter of tea. The hill country, too, was transformed. It had acquired not only a rich green covering of pile, but also two new races, and a beautiful workforce of women.
All around, the hills had erupted in work. Everywhere there was plucking, climbing, trimming, bagging, heaving and weighing. But in this landscape of verbs, it was only ever women. Collectively, they were exquisite: a mountainside speckled with colour and saris. But, close up, they could look obdurate and wary. Most worked barefoot, a knife at the hip, a basket slung from the forehead and a plug of gold through the nose.
As young women, they could be statuesque, but the life soon shrank them, blackening joints and shrivelling faces. Few looked up as we passed, and the work went on, anxiously and without expression. To qualify for her day’s pay, each picker had to climb the hillside, plucking around half her body weight in new shoots, or ‘flush’. For this, she’d earn around three pounds.
Surprisingly, Sanath hardly seemed to notice these women. They didn’t belong in his version of the highlands, and were incomprehensible, heathen and foreign. They not only send money back to India, they worshipped thousands of gods, and their language - Tamil — sounded like bulbuls. But they weren’t even like the Tamils from the north of the island. The ‘Tea Tamils’ — as he called them — were mostly sudams, a caste so low they were almost a sub-life. Nor did he care that they were amongst the most poorly paid workers in the country, and that many were virtually stateless and unable to vote. ‘If they don’t like it, they can always go home.’
‘Home’, for the Tea Tamils, was a complex idea. Although they’d been here for many generations, they’d never truly belonged. They knew that, in their ancestry, there was a sea voyage and a point of origin. For a long time, they’d referred to India as ‘the coast’, as if they’d just left. It didn’t seem to matter that they hadn’t yet arrived anywhere else. They were famously fatalistic and congenitally poor. All that mattered was getting through today and tomorrow would take care of itself. This had made them profligate with money. Kudden illharth harl, moolay ill kzrath harl as they’d say (He that has no debts, has no brains).
Such stoicism had made them ripe for uprooting. It was the coffee planters who’d spotted their mobility and their weakness for wages. Until then, it had been hard to find paid labour (a concept the Kandyans still found repulsive). But, by 1840, the British were recruiting in India, and over the next ten years, over a million qulis, or labourers, arrived. This is not a proud moment for the planters.
The Tamils were shipped over in foul conditions and then made to walk the last 150 miles from the coast. Almost a third died on the way to work, and the planters soon learnt to order twice the number they needed. “That’s why we’re so strong,” a Tamil once told me, ‘because we survived the voyage’. They continued to arrive for the rest of the century. When blight called ‘Devastating Emily’ wiped out the coffee, it was replaced by tea, an even greedier employer.
Many estates would need up to 1,500 workers, or one per acre. By 1900, the Tea Tamils made up seven per cent of the population, and yet still this wasn’t home. The Sinhalese regarded them as Indian, and — after independence — had them stripped of the vote. Between then and the sixties, huge numbers were ‘repatriated’, even though Ceylon was the only home they’d ever known. Strangely, their linguistic cousins, the Sri Lankan Tamils, raised little objection. Even for them, the Tea Tamils were just too foreign - and, of course, the wrong caste.
Once, near Ambewela, I broke the old rules and headed down to ‘the lines’. In the heyday of tea, Europeans would never have done this. Not only were the workers’ shacks considered unhealthy, it was also important to maintain a tradition of distance. This was as much for the Tamils’ sake as anyone else’s.
Out in the fields, the white man may be the periya dorah, or big master, but he was also born of a pariah caste. To have him in your home was spiritually unhygienic.
(Excerpt from ‘Elephant Complex’ by John Gimlette, Hachette India, `650)
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