Up Country Tamils: Charting a New Future in Sri Lanka were young men who left their villages and families behind, leaving them free to alter their identities in the diaspora (Jayawardena 1971, 92). In contrast, contract-based kankani systems in Sri Lanka and Malaysia encouraged group migration, including neighbours, relatives, or even entire families. Up-country Tamils endured displacement and discrimination as part of the diasporic process, not just due to their physical migration from India, but also because of their experiences in Sri Lanka. In both colonial and independent Sri Lanka, governing authorities viewed Up-country Tamils as an inassimilable other, thus legitimating their continued economic and political marginalisation. Up-country Tamils have become emplaced in the diaspora, yet have been made to feel that Sri Lanka is neither their home nor their homeland. I have elsewhere elaborated further about how this situation compares with those of Up-country Tamils’ cousins in Malaysia, Mauritius, Fiji, and Trinidad (Bass 2012, 22-47), but I will next focus on some specific examples of ways that Up-country Tamils are charting a new future by mapping their past. In recent years, many Up-county Tamil activists and politicians have highlighted one fundamental area in which Upcountry Tamils, or at least those still living on estates, are not equal citizens of Sri Lanka. In terms of local government, estates were not included in the Pradeshiya Sabhas Act until late 2018, depriving Estate Tamils of the public services received by other Sri Lankans. Since the colonial era, the government has treated tea estates as economic entities where the normal rules do not apply. While Pradeshiya Sabhas were only established in 1987, they are built upon earlier Village Councils, which similarly 6