IT'S JUST AFTER 6 am on 29 July, and the ordinarily quiet village of Talaimannar, on the small island of Mannar just off the northwest coast of Sri Lanka, is already alive with activity. The sun has just recently risen and the air is still cool. Inside St Lawrence Church, some are listening to the pastor. Others chat in front of the church's soft-orange façade, emblazoned in Tamil with words from the Gospel of John, 15:9: "Abide in my love."
The crowd isn't here for a church service, but rather to set off on a journey 200 years in the making. Sometime around 1823, British colonial administrators began recruiting people from southern India to work as indentured labourers in what was then Ceylon. The labourers were brought over to build transportation systems and cultivate land in the hill country at the centre of the island, a region known as the Malaiyaham. This was territory the British had forcefully acquired after the 1818 Uva–Wellassa Rebellion, which saw Kandyan chieftains' revolt against the colonial administration soon after the Kingdom of Kandy was relinquished to the British Crown. The British especially saw an opportunity to scale up and appropriate local coffee production, already happening on a small scale, and needed a steady supply of workers to achieve this. While Ceylonese labourers helped clear land on the coffee estates, they refused to work on the estates themselves due to the low wages on offer.
The British began to ferry labourers over from India by ship. The first of them made landfall at Talaimannar, before making a perilous trek of some 250 kilometres through forested land and into the hill country. Two hundred years later, their descendants, the Malaiyaha Tamils, have gathered to retrace the journey, walking from Talaimannar to Matale in Sri Lanka's Central Province over a period of two weeks.
The walk is as much an act of protest as of remembrance. Among the demands being made by the Malaiyaha Tamil community are an acknowledgement of their history, struggles and contribution to Sri Lanka, the recognition of their distinct identity, a living wage, equal pay, land rights and parity of status for the Tamil language, access to government services, an equitable and inclusive electoral system, and affirmative action in healthcare and education. Malaiyaha Tamils are among the most marginalised communities in the country. In April, the World Bank noted that more than half of the estate workers were living below the poverty line of USD 3.65 a day. Malaiyaha Tamils also continue to suffer social discrimination based on caste, class, labour segmentation and ethnicity.