Jun 18th, 2001
Nuwara Eliya
Nuwara Eliya, the “city of lights,” is the highest town in Sri Lanka and that means a break from the oppressive heat and humidity that surrounds the rest of the country.
It was found by a group of British officers during the earlier part of the 19th century, who as the story goes, had gotten lost while elephant hunting. The British governor at the time, Sir Edward Barnes, was told about this little town and subsequently decided to take residence there, soon creating a health resort, which soon became internationally renown.
It is surrounded by a seemingly endless array of tea plantations populated by tea pickers who are almost exclusively Indian Tamils, who are distinct from the Ceylonese Tamils who live in the Northeast of the country. Although both groups of Tamils speak the Tamil language and practice Hinduism, Indian Tamils were mostly brought over by the British from Southern India to work as laborers on plantations whereas Ceylonese Tamils are descendent of are descendent of Tamil dynasties who have a long history of bloodshed with the Sri Lankan Sinhalese majority. The days, Tamils are treated as second-class citizens and have to deal with many oppressive laws and regulations.
One example came in 1972, when the Prime-minister at the time, Srimavo Bandaranaike, took measures to increase the numbers of Sinhalese in the universities and in public service through his process of “standardization,” which is something along the lines of US affirmative action, except in favor of the majority.
The living conditions of the Indian Tamils who work on the tea plantations are somewhat less than perfect. Every morning, they have a two to three hour commute up the hillside, where they work until sundown at which point they have to commute another two to three hours in order to retunr home. For all their efforts, they make somewhere in the neighborhood of two dollars/day.
