Up Country Tamils: Charting a New Future in Sri Lanka Repositioning Up-country Tamils as a diasporic community provides a comparative framework to understand alternative possibilities for Up-country Tamils future on the island. Just like other communities comprised of descendants of colonialera Indian plantation diasporas, in Fiji, Malaysia, Mauritius and Trinidad, Up-country Tamils have faced similar problems of displacement, battles over citizenship, and struggles for their rights. I posit that Up-country Tamils form a “diaspora nextdoor” to their ancestral homeland. Most comparative scholars of Indian diasporas (Carter and Torabully 2002; Rai and Reeves 2009; van der Veer 1995; Vertovec 2000) have, by and large, also neglected to include Up-country Tamils in their analyses, with the notable exception of the comprehensive Encyclopedia of the Indian Diaspora (Lal 2006). This absence is usually because of Sri Lanka’s long-standing historical and cultural links with India, which is, after all, only forty kilometres away. However, India was just as imagined for nineteenth century Tamil plantation workers born in Sri Lanka as it was for Indians in Malaysia, Mauritius, and Trinidad. Diasporas next door are actually quite common around the world. Besides Up-country Tamils in Sri Lanka, examples of diasporas next door include the Irish in England, Palestinians in Jordan, and Koreans in Japan. All of these groups have lived in neighbouring nation-states for generations, a short distance away from their proverbial homeland. The recent migration of Syrians to Turkey, Lebanon, and Jordan may lead to similar diasporas next door, if significant numbers of their descendants remain in these new lands. 4