LABOUR-SRI LANKA: Fabled Tea Plantations Profit on Women

By Feizal Samath Reprint | | Print |

Feizal Samath

KANDY, Sri Lanka, Jan 22 1998 (IPS) - Seeranga’s day of toil begins at the crack of dawn, when she gets up quietly from her mat, piles firewood into the family hearth and boils the water for tea and a light breakfast.

Her husband and two children are asleep but wake up as the 46- year-old tea plucker is about to prepare a few rotis or bread baked on a griddle.

By 7 a.m, her two boys have been washed and start their long walk to school. At 7.30 a.m, Seeranga is on the chilly, wind- swept slopes with a gunny bag across her back, plucking tea leaves. If she is a few minutes later than 7.30 a.m. her supervisor chases her away and she loses the day’s wages.

The bright coloured but tattered saree which lightly covers her emaciated body does not afford much protection from the cold. She works through the day, stopping for an hour for lunch, until the mists shroud the mountains in the evening again. Her “official” workday ends at 4.30 p.m.

Then begins her home chores: cooking, cleaning, washing up and attending to the needs of her husband and children. “No complaints,” she grins shyly, looking down at her gnarled and calloused hands, when asked whether she has any problems.

But that is the problem, declare non-governmental groups. Like thousands of other female workers in Sri Lankan tea plantations, Seeranga has learnt to grin and bear. The women accept with stoic resignation their daily drudgery, the routine abuse, beatings and rape by drunken husbands, malnutrition, verbal abuse and sexual harassment by superiors, activists say in dismay.

Sri Lanka’s mostly female tea pluckers have suffered discrimination and exploitation from the time of the British, who first brought Indian labour to work on Sri Lankan plantations, when the country was under their rule. This was in the 1860s when coffee, which was widely grown by British planters in Sri Lanka, then known as Ceylon, gave way to tea, after the coffee blight.

With locals refusing to work for the British and since tea was a labour intensive crop, cheaper labour was shipped in from south India. The Indian Tamils were hired through contractors called “kanganys”, who tempted them with stories of fortunes being amassed among the tea bushes in Sri Lanka.

Barrack-type rectangular sheds, later called “coolie lines”, in most instances with no basic facilities, were constructed on the plantations for the workforce to live in. Each family had one small room, where they lived, cooked, ate and slept.

Their needs, the management felt, would be satisfied on the estates. But the housing conditions were atrocious, toilet facilities poor, education non-existent, disease rampant and mortality rates high.

Little changed even after the country gained independence from the British in 1948. Plantation workers in Sri Lanka are still an economically repressed and socially isolated community, and the women in particular suffer more than the men.

There have been some feeble efforts to improve the facilities over the years — but these have been more cosmetic than anything else. By and large the women continue to barely survive.

“They just don’t know what is good and what is bad. They don’t know what basic rights are,” says Menaka Kandasamy, a social activist, who is attempting to give voice to the grievances of the mute and illiterate female worker.

Kandasamy says plantation women have no rights, unlike their counterparts in the rest of the country. Their wages are paid to their men, as they cannot count or sign their names. The men waste the hard earned money on ‘kasippu’ (illicit liquor), sometimes leaving nothing to keep the home fires burning.

Stories abound about periodic rape and wife beating, which is the accepted rule, says Kandasamy, women’s coordinator at the Institute of Social Development, in the central hill town of Kandy, which is working to uplift plantation worker conditions, by teaching basic rights and leadership through training courses.

The nights hold special horrors for the women. “They dread the night. Drunken men forcing their wives to have sexual intercourse in an often brutal manner is common among most women,” Kandasamy said.

“The victims have no way of complaining. To whom do they complain anyway? The ‘kangany’ — he is part of this vicious circle, routinely harassing and raping the women in his control,” she added.

Lalith Abeyasinghe, head of Satyodaya, a non-governmental organisation that has been working for the past 25 years in the

plantation areas, says that their priority is to educate the women of what is beyond their home and the tea bushes.

“They don’t know what goes on outside. They are in little prisons,” he said. Many workers treated as “stateless”, because their family came from India, have to get permission from the management when they venture out of the estates.

But Kandy-based NGOs are determined to change the lives of plantation women. They hope that through local community groups in the estates, women like Kandasamy and Devi will some day gain the courage to fight back.