"Life Is Where We Are Not: Making and Managing the Plantation Tamil" by Ravindran Sriramachandran

Ravindran Sriramachandran

Deposited 2010

Abstract
"Life is where we are not: Making and Managing the Plantation Tamil" is an ethnographic, cultural and historical analysis of the impact of migration in colonial and post-colonial South Asia. I trace the history of migration, disenfranchisement and repatriation of the Tamil plantation worker through the 19th and 20th centuries. Through recounting this history of the Plantation laborer: famine, migration, long treks to the mountains, encountering new disciplinary modes, Sri Lankan and Indian nationalism, disenfranchisement, return to India, and alienation in the "mother land", I look at subject formation in the colonial world as an effect of global trade and the logic of capital rather than territorial control and its consequences in post-colonial nation space. I explore the emergent subjectivities of the laborer-coolie/planter/colonial official and, several other actors related to the massive historical experience of the plantations. The thesis focuses on how, consequent to the plantation saga, new entities come to be constituted by colonial and post-colonial discursive formations and everyday practices, having a bearing on the lives of repatriated workers and post-colonial polities till date. Working within an ethnographic and historical frame, my thesis explores the ramifications of the contact between European "Capital" and "Colonialism" and a newly formed hybrid society, among others, of Sinhalese, Sri Lankan Tamil and Indian Tamil immigrants in the nineteenth-century.

The second part of my thesis addresses the consequences of this new 'identity' or 'subject' in post-colonial South Asia. The disenfranchised 'coolie' finds himself a stranger on landing in India. What makes this possible? How does one 'belong'? How does one negotiate belonging, with the state and with the local community? There is an assumed isomorphism, by the dominant community and the state, of space, place and culture on the one hand, and reification of uprootedness as the paradigmatic experience of the 'repatriate' on the other. Against these aforementioned schemas, drawing from Foucault and William Connolly's work Identity/Difference and the debates surrounding 'Multiculturalism', by examining the post-colonial political history of India in particular and the sub-continent in general I raise, in my thesis, the ways in which cultural identity, in migration and repatriation is at once deterritorialised and reterritorialised.