Better Must Come Indian origin is a continuous feature of the island’s history’ 60 and not a midnineteenth century aberration. Second, attempts to quantify the nineteenth century population of what would one day be the Up-Country Tamil community are largely fruitless, for not only did the actual number of labourers go unrecorded until 1868, the available population figures have been determined by analysing net passenger traffic between India and Ceylon. Lastly, as both Peebles and Daniel Bass argue, 61 the rapid expansion and scale of Ceylon’s coffee plantations before 1885, and the attendant maintenance thereof, would have required a permanent labour force during the coffee era, suggesting that this community was resident long before the final decades of the nineteenth century. Ultimately, Peebles work demonstrates that there was a resident (Up-Country) Tamil population in Ceylon’s central region from at least the 1830s onward, that calls of how many or how few of these people were resident are altogether trivial and that the charge of circulatory migration denies the nineteenth century presence in Ceylon of this community and serves only to emphasise their collective foreignness. 62 Nevertheless, the nineteenth century was a period of intermittent drought, famine, debt, landlessness and increasing population pressures in the Madras Presidency whereby peasants had little option but to choose between debt bondage and starvation in Madras or work on Ceylon’s coffee or tea plantations to survive, inducing many to relocate to Ceylon either independently or through recruitment. 63 The harsh labour regimes that awaited the Up-Country Tamil labour force, coupled with the deployment of surveillance, soft social mechanisms, legal and extra-legal and economic and extra-economic coercion 64 on the part of planters gave rise to a method of labour control on Ceylonese plantations, not unlike that of the earlier slave plantations of the New World. 65 These methods of labour control also meant that the Up-Country Tamil experience as one of captive labour on enclave-like tea estates had crystallised before the dawn of the twentieth century. 60 61 62 63 64 65 ibid 24. ibid; Daniel Bass, Everyday Ethnicity in Sri Lanka: Up-Country Tamil Identity Politics (Social Scientists’ Association 2015). Peebles (n 58). Roberts (n 51); Nadesan (n 49); Vijayapalan (n 37); Jayarwardena and Kurian (n 47). Soft social mechanisms included the caste hierarchy quickly established on plantations, whereby the kangany (Tamil word for supervisor) was of a higher caste than the labourers, and thus able to wield undue power and control over the labour force. Legal and extra-legal coercion included the Service Contracts Ordinance No 5 of 1841 and the Master and Servants Ordinance No 11 of 1865 which together criminalised a leave of employment short of one month’s notice or without reasonable cause, drunkenness, disobedience, insolence and other misconduct however loosely defined. Also, the Tundu system employed on plantations until 1921 which required workers to obtain a discharge ticket from their employer before they could either leave the plantation or seek employment on another plantation falls within the scope of extra-legal coercion. Economic and extra-economic coercion includes the advances that planters gave to kanganies to cover the travel expenses of the labourers they recruited from southern India, which were then incurred by individual labourers meaning that each labourer began work life on a plantation deeply indebted to his or her kangany. As well, the authority of the kangany over the workers and his role of overseeing all the financial affairs of his labour gang gave rise to an epidemic of arrears in wages, non-payment, fraud and extortion, all of which falls within the scope of extra-economic coercion. N Shanmugaratnam, Privatisation of Tea Plantations: The Challenge of Reforming Production Relations in Sri Lanka, an Institutional Historical Perspective (Social Scientists’ Association 1997); Peebles (n 58); Jayarwardena and Kurian (n 47). 15