Mythri Jegathesan at the UC Davis Global Tea Initiative for Tea Culture and Science 2nd Annual Colloquium: “The Sensory Aspects of Tea” on January 19, 2017. This talk explores the relationship between tea plantation labor and production and coolie identity formation and heritage in Sri Lanka. Also how the human voice—through the poetry, and song written and performed by Tamil plantation residents—reinforce coolie narratives of labor, connectivity, and desires for social recognition in a multicultural, postwar Sri Lanka. This reinforcement creates a coolie poesis—an emergence of a complex labor heritage to be duly acknowledged in Sri Lanka’s colonial and postcolonial history and present.
Archives par mot-clé : coolie
“Plucking the Stars (நட்சத்திரங்களைப் பறித்தல்). Arulraj Ulaganathan” by B. Skanthakumar (Polity)
Plucking the Stars (நட்சத்திரங்களைப் பறித்தல்) conjures memory from Arulraj Ulaganathan’s childhood on a tea plantation in Haputale, where he was born in 1992 and raised in a line room; as well as those of generations before him on a cruel incomplete 200-year passage from coolies to citizens. He wants, he says, to give “voice through my art to the silenced histories of the Malaiyaham [Hill Country]”. And so he does, in ways that stir and stay with us.
The artist’s second solo exhibition ran between 14 and 31 January 2026 at the Curado Art Space on Park Road in Colombo, spread across its second and third floors, which are accessible by stairs only. It was staged in collaboration with the ninth edition of Colomboscope; whose artistic director Natasha Ginwala crafted with the artist the useful notes for the catalogue from which I take my cues below.
The artiste’s exhibition full review by B. Skanthakumar is available on Polity Website
