Toonder Response

From even the introduction, this book asserts a strong narrative voice that provides perspective on the author’s ethnographic methods as a woman in Sri Lanka. I enjoyed the way Jegathesan described her interactions with the people around her, interjecting important historical background and definitions needed for the audience to follow along. For example, her analysis of the word “coolie” was especially interesting to me because of how contested the name and claiming of it is; the degree of political controversy surrounding it makes it critical to the author’s exploration of work in postwar Sri Lanka, as “the physical move from homeland to industrial landscape” captures generational impacts of “India’s global diaspora” (14). I also found it fascinating how certain groups are working to reclaim this word to “deconstruct stereotypical narratives of India’s dispersed indentured laborers” in the midst of current debates over communities of Tamil speakers on plantations (14). In her work, the author explores how “women workers want to be seen and the structural constraints they face as they move, work, and live in the face of everyday, systemic forms of marginalization” with regard to “key features of tea plantation life” from a “feminist and humanistic perspective” to illustrate the relationship between political landscapes, identity rifts, and production ethics (11). Even as a reader, it feels overwhelming to imagine how her ethnographic methodology could possibly begin to tackle such systemic industrialization built upon “class stigmatizations” of labor (22).