Up-country Tamils: Charting a New Future in Sri Lanka Daniel Bass Since their ancestors’ arrival on the island in the nineteenth century, Up-country Tamils have lived at the margins of Sri Lankan society and politics, while being an integral part of the country’s import-export economy. This book, like the August 2017 conference on which it is based, focuses on the ways in which Up-country Tamils continue to be marginalised, how far they have entered the mainstream, and the difficulties that they have faced along the way. The present moment provides an opportune time for considering the role of the Up-country Tamils, and the interactions between majority and minority, and between margin and mainstream in contemporary Sri Lanka. In the ten years since the end of the war in May 2009, most political and academic debate and discussion about ethnic reconciliation have centred on a simplistic Sinhala-Tamil binary, ignoring other ethnic groups and the multiplicity of Tamil identities on the island. Background What does it mean to be a Tamil in post-war Sri Lanka? The end of the war brought some relief concerning the most pressing issues the country faced in the past three decades in ending the brutal violence that caused the deaths, debilitation, and displacement of thousands of Sri Lankans. Yet, it has not resolved many issues relating to majority-minority relations