When Kerala absorbed Sri Lankan ‘repatriates’

In 1964, when Lal Bahadur Shastri and Sirimavo Bandaranaike signed the Agreement on Persons of Indian Origin in Ceylon (Sirimavo-Shastri Pact), the countries agreed to solve the question of “Indian Tamils” on the island.

While Ceylon called this community of over one million Tamils, who were the backbone of the plantation economy, “Indian nationals,” New Delhi classified them as “stateless.” Essentially, this community was living in citizenship limbo after Ceylon attained independence.

As part of the 1964 pact, India agreed to take in 525,000 people, while Ceylon granted citizenship to 300,000. The status of 150,000 people was resolved in 1974 with the signing of the Sirimavo-Indira Pact, when each nation agreed to grant citizenship to 75,000 people.

90 per cent of these repatriates were accommodated in Tamil Nadu, while the rest were sent to Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka and Kerala. The smallest of these states, Kerala, had a population density of 549 people per square kilometre, but in national interest and humanitarian grounds still agreed to take in these people who were essentially victims of racist policies in Sri Lanka at that time.

To enable these people to find gainful employment, the Kerala government (with assistance from the centre) set up new rubber plantations by clearing out 2,000 hectares of reserve forest land. The plantations in Punalur and Ayiranallur, 50 kilometres away from Kollam, were established in the early 1970s.

A report published by the University of Kerala’s Department of History in 1979 has some very interesting observations about the people who were resettled in these plantations. This report, written by C Vasudevan, said that seven housing colonies were set up for the newly arrived plantation workers.

“One who drives along the plantation cannot but be charmed by the panoramic beauty, with the scientifically planted and nurtured young trees still waiting for the full tapping to require the efforts of the labour of the repatriates,” Vasudevan wrote in the report. He said that the people who were “unfortunate to be uprooted from the country of their birth” would be able to make a decent living in the plantation, while Kerala was set to get a “huge revenue.”

Vasudevan noted that most of these people felt like strangers in India and couldn’t even properly trace their ancestry to the country. “Many were born in Sri Lanka and from their grandmothers, they know only that their ancestors came from India centuries back,” he wrote.

It is unsurprising that they had a “tinge of Sinhalese culture in their behaviour and even in their customs,” as the report put it. Vasudevan said the people would take solace in the fact that they would never be uprooted again.

One major difference between this group of arrivals to India and those who would later come as refugees from Sri Lanka was that the repatriates could freely bring their money and jewellery with them. When they first arrived, they were put up at the Mandapam Camp, from where the Indian authorities conducted surveys about their level of education, basic wealth and family connections in India.

96 per cent of the repatriates claimed Tamil ancestry, while seven families said they were descendants of migrants from the Kollam, Alappuzha and Ernakulam districts.

Vasudevan was full of praise for the new arrivals in Kerala. “That these repatriates were not a burden in Sri Lanka nor are they to India, is clear from the fact that all these 308 families were earning, while they were in Sri Lanka and of course in India too,” he noted in the report. Not all the new arrivals were estate labourers on the island, but those in other professions quickly adapted to plantation work.

Though the number of repatriates engaged in a vocation other than plantation work in Sri Lanka was only 44, that these people who were salesmen, drivers, kanganies [labour recruiters], watchers, teachers, etc., adapted to the circumstances in India as ordinary labourers in the plantation, is something remarkable,” Vasudevan said. “The lone teacher, who had the highest income of Rs. 300 in Sri Lanka, has been working as a labourer in this plantation.”

Five decades after these families were brought to Kerala, it would be interesting to see how their lives turned out and how their children and grandchildren look at the great displacement of the 1960s and '70s.

It is also worth noting that a proposal in the 1980s to resettle people from Sri Lanka in the Palakkad district to work in powerlooms did not work out.

In 2003, Sirimavo Bandaranaike’s daughter Chandrika Kumaratunga, as president of Sri Lanka, played a big role in the passing of the Grant of Citizenship to Persons of Indian Origin Act No. 35 of 2003. This legislation made way for the granting of Sri Lankan citizenship to permanent residents of Indian origin residing in Sri Lanka since October 1964 or their resident descendants. The act, which had bipartisan support, was passed unanimously by the Sri Lankan Parliament and, as a result, 145,000 people were granted citizenship of the island nation.