Up Country Tamils: Charting a New Future in Sri Lanka and power sharing in the post-colonial Sri Lankan state. Despite numerous political proclamations and a major change in government, limited progress has been made in regard to postwar ethnic reconciliation in the country. Up-country Tamils are the descendants of migrant workers from South India, who travelled to Ceylon between the 1830s and the 1930s, to work on coffee, tea, and rubber plantations in the island’s central highlands, loosely identified as the Up-country. At Independence in 1948, the population of Up-country Tamils formed a majority of the Tamil population of Sri Lanka, but other communities often saw them as Indians insufficiently rooted in the country. This perception became a reality with the passage of the Citizenship Acts in 1948 and 1949, and repatriation of approximately 40 per cent of the community, starting in 1967. The outbreak of the war in 1983 ended repatriation, but led to further problems, as violence engulfed much of the island. This book addresses the many problems that Up-country Tamils face in contemporary Sri Lanka, politically, economically, and socially, as well as the historical origins and structural determinants of their current predicament. The individual chapter authors pay particular attention to the changes that have taken place for Up-country Tamils since the end of the war in 2009, and their implications for the future of the community. At the time of writing this introduction, in the immediate aftermath of the April 2019 Easter attacks, reconciliation seems like an ever more distant dream. Yet, the analyses in this book, focused on Up-country Tamils’ precarious position in twenty-first century Sri Lanka, are still salient as Sri Lankans come to terms with a new social and political reality. xiv