Plantation Patriarchy and Structural Violence: Women Workers in Sri Lanka

__Abstract__ Plantation production began in Sri Lanka in the early 19th century under British colonial rule, when the government provided financial incentives and infrastructural support for the commercialisation and export of agricultural crops in line with promoting laissez-faire capitalism. Motivated by the possibility of making high profits, British entrepreneurs, including several officials, took up the large-scale cultivation of initially coffee, and then subsequently, tea, rubber and coconut. Keen to minimise their costs of labour, the planters recruited workers from neighbouring districts of the Madras Presidency in south India where there were large numbers badly affected by the widespread famine and indebtedness in the region. The spread of plantation production in the 19th and 20th centuries resulted in a more permanent workforce, constituting the single largest and organised segment of the working class in the country. While women formed a small proportion of the early pattern of migration, their numbers subsequently increased and, by the 20th century, they comprised half the now permanent workforce on the plantations

Natesa Aiyar and Meenachi Ammal: Pioneers of Trade Unionism and Feminism on The Plantations

Natesa Aiyar and Meenachi were labour activists, politicians and visionaries who used their the oratory and organisational skills, to mobilise the workers to struggle mobilise for better working conditions and wages, as well citizenship rights for all women and men on the plantations. exploitative conditions but he also emphasised the need to provide higher wages to women as well as to ensure children’s right to education

Crossing boundaries:bras, lingerie and rape myths in postcolonial urban middle-class India

With the processes of modernization, urbanization and the entry of women in the formal labour market in Indian metropolitan spaces, this paper examines how the modern middle-class woman’s sartorial choices become enmeshed in popular rape myths (false beliefs) that serve to blame her for the wearing of western clothing. The paper articulates the ways in which middle-class women’s social realities are shaped by historical, colonial and nationalist ideologies of modernization, constructed and mediated through moral codes of dressing. By drawing upon original and contemporary empirical narratives from the urban spaces of Delhi and Mumbai, we emphasise how everyday sartorial choices, in relation to particularly the bra and lingerie, can reveal the nuanced ways in which Urban Indian Professional Women (UIPW) seek to understand, negotiate, and resist patriarchal power. Our findings shed light on conflicting and contradictory spatial experiences, where some women internalize and negotiate moral codes of dressing, out of fear, and others who transgress are subject to sanctions. Given the paucity of scholarly literature in this area, the paper makes an important theoretical and empirical contribution with its focus on postcoloniality and everyday discursive material spaces of gendered and sexualized dress practices. It argues for the consciousness raising of everyday urban geographies of dress that reveal complicated structures of power that are often deemed hidden

Feminism and Nationalism In The Third World

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[Natesa Aiyar and Meenachi Ammal: Pioneers of Trade Unionism and Feminism on The Plantations]

[Publication in Tamil] Natesa Aiyar and Meenachi were labour activists, politicians and visionaries who used their the oratory and organisational skills, to mobilise the workers to struggle mobilise for better working conditions and wages, as well citizenship rights for all women and men on the plantations. exploitative conditions but he also emphasised the need to provide higher wages to women as well as to ensure children’s right to education