The Plantation Tamils of Ceylon (New Historical Perspectives on Migration)

In The Plantation Tamils of Ceylon, Patrick Peebles studies and redefines the history of a people over the course of a century (1840 to 1940). The Plantation Tamils, the descendants of people who came from India to grow the plantation crops on which the colonial economy was based, suffered generations of discrimination and political repression before they became citizens in the 1980s. As this work shows, they had become a distinct Sri Lankan community long before this time. Other scholars have screened out some of the biases in the records, but they also have reinforced biases that suit their own agendas. This book investigates more carefully how knowledge of the Plantation Tamils was produced and in doing so dispels some of the more persistent myths about the Plantation Laborers. The result is not a complete narrative history of the Plantation Tamils, but it should make such a history less difficult to write in the future.