1. Charting Uncertain Futures: Diaspora, Citizenship and Belonging among Up-country Tamils Daniel Bass As Sri Lanka slowly emerges from decades of war and years of corrupt authoritarian rule, Up-country Tamils’ place in the country remains unsettled. Up-country Tamils have lived on the margins of Sri Lankan society since their ancestors’ arrival from India generations ago, but they are charting a new future for themselves in twenty-first century Sri Lanka. In this chapter, I discuss how their plan for this new future is built on mapping the recent past. I first discuss how Up-country Tamils have formed what I term a “diaspora next door”. I suggest that a productive way of analysing Up-country Tamils precarious position is viewing them as part of a larger Indian plantation worker diaspora. I then turn to three key aspects of Up-country Tamils diasporic condition: the limits of local government, discussions of demographic changes, and permutations of party politics. The rise of a distinct Upcountry Tamil identity in the latter part of the twentieth century provided new ways to conceptualise their identification with the island without renouncing their Indian history and heritage. In this chapter, I examine how this identification interacts with historical and contemporary debates about who is counted as Sri Lankan, building on my earlier work (Bass 2012, 2016).