Indentured Shadows: Tamil Plantation Servitude in British Ceylon

This thesis examines how nineteenth-century colonial policies in Ceylon shaped the lived experience and long-term marginalisation of Indian Tamil plantation workers. Beginning with the forced migration of indentured labourers to coffee plantations in the first half of the nineteenth century, the study traces how administrative reforms, land policy and recruitment systems consolidated a labour regime that was indispensable to the plantation economy yet excluded from political membership and educational opportunity. Drawing on archival records held in Sri Lanka including contemporary newspapers, missionary reports, and published government returns as well as a selective engagement with secondary literature this research adopts a paracolonial perspective that locates change in the uneasy interaction between metropolitan reform and local intermediaries. Moreover, by investigating the intersection of ethnicity, religion, and gender the thesis shows how patterns established during the coffee era persisted into the twentieth century through citizenship and language policies and continue to inform contemporary tensions. Methodologically grounded and empirically dense, this study seeks to move beyond a simple centre-periphery framing to uncover the mechanisms by which liberal reform and local practice combined to produce durable forms of dependency and exclusion.