Charting Uncertain Futures: Diaspora, Citizenship and Belonging among Up-country Tamils Besides Sri Lanka’s physical closeness to India, the other major reason why scholars have not always analysed Up-country Tamils as part of a diaspora is the island’s large population of Sri Lankan Tamils. This dominant ethnic nomenclature implicitly denies a certain Sri Lankan-ness to Up-country Tamils. Although Up-country Tamils were a majority of all Tamils in Sri Lanka until the 1960s, the government has consistently labelled them as “Indian Tamils” since the 1911 census, and thus implicitly not really Sri Lankan. In contrast, I argue that being Indian and being Sri Lankan are not mutually exclusive identities. Being part of the Indian diaspora does not preclude Up-country Tamils’ being part of Sri Lanka. A central part of the diasporic condition is the cultural and social connection to more than one place at the same time, but one’s present location shapes how one views one’s homeland. For example, Viranjini Munasinghe (2001, 259) argues, “to be Indian in Trinidad—what it means to be ethnic in practice—is also to be Indian in an unmistakably Trinidadian fashion”. Up-country Tamils interactions with their fellow Sri Lankans over many generations have shaped how they understand their links to India and how they identify with Sri Lanka. Although Up-country Tamils in Sri Lanka did become a diaspora next door, I am not arguing that geographical distance from India was irrelevant to diasporic identity formation. While the voyage from India to the Caribbean took several months in the late nineteenth century, it took just a few weeks to travel to Sri Lanka. The structures of recruitment for indenture also selected for a predisposition to individualism, since most of the migrants 5