A Sri Lanka Air Force helicopter scattered jasmine blossoms on the cortege of Savumyamoorthy Thondaman, the son of a humble plantation worker who made the long trek from South India to Sri Lanka's hilly tea country in search of the crock of gold at the end of the eternal rainbow. Karuppiah "Head Kangany", Thondaman's father, did make his fortune, eventually buying the British-owned estate where he had once laboured. But never would he have dreamt that 76 years after he brought Thondaman to Ceylon, as the country was then known, his son's remains would be cremated at the Independence Square in a state funeral.
It was amidst controversy (to which he was never a stranger) that Thondaman made his final journey to his pyre on 3 November. Sri Lanka's armed forces were taking an unprecedented battering from the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Elam (LTTE) in the northeastern Wanni region, and the use of a military helicopter to honour the departed leader at a time the army was under siege, infuriated many Sinhalese who did not mince their words. To them, Thondaman was a shrewdly-cunning politician who used his leverage on the estate (Indian) Tamil vote to make and break Sinhala-majority governments.
Shrewd he was, cunning he might have been. But it was all for the cause of emancipating a backward people who seemed doomed to pluck tea and tap rubber on the thottams (plots), generation after generation. For over 50 years, Thondaman was the leader of the Indian or estate community, most of whose members were workers in the tea and rubber plantations. As head of the Ceylon Workers Congress (CWC), the country's numerically-strongest trade union (dominated by Indian Tamils), he had been able to deliver a dominant share of their votes to both the United National Party (UNP) and the Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP), which have alternated in office in Independent Sri Lanka. At various times, he served as a Member of Parliament, both elected and appointed, and in the last 22 years of his life, he held important cabinet office in the governments of J.R. Jayewardene, R. Premadasa, D.B. Wijetunge and Chandrika Kumaratunga.
Maker-breaker
Thondaman took the rail ferry across the Palk Strait from South India to Ceylon at age 11 and came by train to Gampola, a plantation town above Kandy, where his father proudly met him in his recently acquired Austin tourer. The boy who had never been in a car all his life, was promptly sick and threw up in the vehicle. As he told his biographer: "My father scolded me saying 'I have just bought this car from the dorai (master) and see what you have done.' The car was stopped and instantly washed."
Karuppiah was as remarkable a man as Thondaman was to be. Coming to Sri Lanka as an ordinary labourer, he rose to be head kangany and labour contractor, providing workers for Wavendon Estate at Ramboda in the Nuwara Eliya district. Entrepreneurial and thrifty, he was able to amass a fortune and buy out the British owners. Efficiently managing the plantation with minimum overheads and branching out into other areas of business like supplies and transport for the estates, he was able to leave his son a wealthy man.