Introduction

Between the two World Wars, Virginia Woolf wrote these lines about an ideal cosmopolitan world we yearn for. This book is about an ethnic community that wished to belong to “a” country but was excluded and denied its wishes. The experience of this community is virtually unprecedented, although perhaps parallels could be drawn with the Jews under Hitler, the Turkish minority in Western Thrace – who were deprived of citizenship when the country ceded to Greece in 1920 – and, more recently, the Bhutanese Hindus of Nepalese origin, who in 1995 were stripped of their citizenship and forced into exile; like these people, the Indian Tamils, too, became stateless. As Hannah Arendt observed (Arendt 1958, 279), “…the man (woman) without a state was an anomaly for whom there is no appropriate niche in the framework of the general law, an outlaw by definition.” Further, as Arendt goes on to elaborate (283), “non-recognition of statelessness always means repatriation, i.e., to a country of origin.”

In the context of the situation experienced by the plantation workers in the post-independence period in Sri Lanka, applying the term “repatriation” as defined above by Arendt is problematic. The use of the term seems to concede too much to the claims of the state (Cohen 1995, 322).