George Bernard Shaw visited Ceylon in 1948 leaving India completely. So much for the arrogance of the island’s giant neighbor. But that was not all. In a letter to India’s Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, the unlikely playwright wrote: “I used to believe that Ceylon is the cradle of mankind because everyone there seems to be an original. All other nations are clearly mass-produced.” Anthropology was as far from Shaw’s mind as a razor from his beard, but in this observation he struck at both human truth and Sri Lankan truth.
The people of Panna Tapu have traditionally been viewed in terms of ethnic groups. The classification has its uses, for example, in understanding the demographic weighting of sections of its population such as in this latest figure (2012 census): Sinhalese 74.9%; Sri Lankan Tamil 11.2%; Sri Lankan Moors 9.2%; Indian Tamil 4.2%; The other 0.5% (‘Moors’ being a quaint Lankan way of describing, a la Shakespeare and Othello, the Islamic population of the island).
But identity-grouping can be too self-deprecating for a nation.
Muttiah Muralitharan is one of the 4.2% of Sri Lanka’s population known as Indian Tamils. ‘…born in Kandy… in a hill country Tamil (Malaya Tamizhar) Hindu family of tea garden workers, the eldest of four sons born to Lakshmi and Sinnasami Muthiah, who run a successful biscuit-making business , He is Periyasamy’s grandson Sinasamy who came from South India in 1920 to find work in the tea gardens of Ceylon.’ But Murali is also a fastidious spinner of spinners, who sends the ball just as he does, with a dangerous flair for the match, and has ‘taken more wickets in international cricket than any other bowler’ . You can’t get more original than this.
The Sinnasamy family is part of a large group of agricultural laborers who began to migrate to the island from the drought-prone and impoverished districts of southern Madras over a period of 100 years, from about 1830 to 1930. Plantations, especially tea, increased, the number of laborers also increased. Did their income and educational and health scores increase proportionately?
they did not. And here, another ‘native’ Indian Tamil leader and head of the Ceylon Workers’ Congress, the late S. The single-minded and tireless work done by Thondaman made a difference. He was a ‘fast bowler’ of his own kind. His ability to inspire and mobilize his men gave them a voice, gave them self-respect. More than that, it made them feel that they mattered as individuals, as individuals.
And there was the issue of citizenship. After 10, 25, 50, 100 years, were they Sri Lankans or Indians or some of both? Nehru told the Parliament of India on April 9, 1958, ‘He is or should be a citizen of Ceylon.’ He had a moral right to do so, given the Congress-led parliament’s record of affirmative action to reform India’s abusive caste system.
Today that is all history. The Sirimavo–Shastri Pact of 1964 and the Sirimavo–Indira Gandhi Pact of 1974 saw the relocation of large numbers of Indian Tamils to India, a process that Nehru would certainly have opposed. Repatriates are now part of the fluctuating fortunes of India’s under-employed, self-employed and unemployed wage-seekers. But the statutory and futureless status of the Indian Tamils on the Sri Lankan plantations has come to an end. The bulk of the Indian Tamils on Sri Lanka’s plantations are now citizens of that country with voting rights.
More and more youth among Indian Tamils are now looking for avenues of work outside the estates, as Murali’s father did, with reasonable success. On-estate issues persist in terms of lack of housing, medical and educational standards. And in ergonomic criteria. And, Indian Tamils in Sri Lanka have political aspirations that also demand remedial action. These include the retention of the proportional electoral system, power-sharing at the central, provincial and local government levels, and the re-vesting of human settlements, identified by participants in a ‘Malayaham200’ event organized by the Katugastota-based Institute for Social Development. With the state being recognized as plantations (not estates) and villages so that government schemes and services as well as land rights can flow equitably to the community.
changes needed
But looking ahead, Indian Tamils in Sri Lanka now need the following five important changes to be made by and for them:
Firstly, to begin to be seen as distinct and equal Lankans with vast and unique professional expertise who make a major, indeed critically important, contribution to the economic well-being of their country.
Second, to protect their land-based climate-dependent profession from the almost certain threat of adverse and uncertain weather conditions. This calls for urgent, indeed, emergency mitigation strategies, not only in the interest of plantation labor but also for the plantations themselves, and therefore for the Lankan economy.
Third, prepare their workplaces, work-cycles and work-styles for re-visiting plantations to face the real possibility of forms of COVID-19 and other pandemics, especially those of zoonotic origin Doing. It is important to overcome the disruption that shattered plantation aspirations on the two waves of the virus from falling prices to falling exports.
Fourth, to ensure that the sector is no longer vulnerable to policy-related adversaries, such as the ill-advised ban on chemical fertilizers a few months ago that damaged tea gardens, and to respond to it. was creatively designed for A gradual but perceptible change in the taste of tea globally, away from the current black tea pattern towards green and herbal teas.
Fifth, and now most important is to recognize the global opportunity, and equally the challenge, that Artificial Intelligence (AI) is opening up to the community. Opportunities are, among others, to help forecast the weather and, using drones, help make planting, de-weeding and de-infesting, if not zero-defect operations, and, with algorithms, tree-planning of the area. Change the future Authentication has been cited as one area where AI will provide a boon. Labels can and do misrepresent the facts. Conventional methods may fail to look for adulteration or to detect ‘spoilt leaves’ in mixed tea bags. “100% X or 100% Y”, can only be 10% or 20%. AI will tell truth from fake. Calibrating flavors through fraud detection algorithms, sensor technology and chemometrics is going to change the industry. But will AI cut jobs on the estates? Could AI, in the short space of a few months, displace the hundreds of thousands of people working on the island’s hillsides? Will AI, in some erratic brain and in some frenzy of corporate rivalry, tamper with tea or coffee preferences and create a craving for something that can take the place of tea and coffee and the tea bush or tea bush in museums of ancient forest produce? Will make coffee plant items? This is not about science fiction, but about another aspect of AI. Is anyone in Sri Lanka or elsewhere thinking about this? Are there plantation labor unions? they must.
If Sri Lanka’s plantation workers, in a measured but audacious move, were to be made part of the creation and development of an AI University located in the Central Highlands and specializing in algorithms for the plantation sector, their originality as individuals and as individuals I could have the talent to work not for myself but for the betterment of Lanka. 4.2% have been the father of wealth for Sri Lanka, remaining in want themselves. Now is the time for them to be the harbingers of change, to lead and moderate the change themselves.
The author of Pygmalion was an AI drone discussing the future of the island, not a native like Eliza Doolittle who could speak zero-defect English, but women and men with doosra waiting to fly to their individual destinies were spinning.
Gopalakrishna Gandhi is a former administrator and diplomat who served twice in Sri Lanka for six years.