Up Country Tamils: Charting a New Future in Sri Lanka Current Status of Up-country Tamil Women Throughout the paper, I define Up-country women as women who live in both tea and rubber plantations and work as labourers; women who migrated from plantations to urban areas for employment purposes; and women who were displaced from plantations to the North and East at different times and identify themselves as plantation-origin Tamils. This definition is broader than that of Ganeshan (1999) who has written on the dynamics of gender in the ethnic composition of Up-country Tamils in Sri Lanka. According to her definition, the following categories of women are considered to be Upcountry Tamil women: the women estate workers from both tea plantations and rubber plantations; women who migrated to other parts of the country for formal and informal work, for studies, due to ethnic violence, and because of class mobility through educational qualification. Ganeshan further argues that the nationalisation of estates that took place in 1972, and their privatisation in the 1990s, affected women more than men. The closed economic structure of the tea estates did not reveal the issues faced by women to the outside, which is one reason she argues why Up-country Tamil women’s issues were not brought to mainstream discussion until the 1980s. Up-country Tamil women have limited leadership roles in their communities. Up-country Tamil male plantation workers have more time and space to participate in the work of creating culture and identity than women working in the plantations, who are much less likely to interact with the world outside their communities, because their time and space is much more limited (Red Flag Women’s Movement 2012: 71). 56