Dilrook Kannangara

Talks of a land bridge between India and Sri Lanka are buzzing once again. Those who feel nostalgic about the time when there was some kind of connectivity miss the point that it was built by the British to bring down slaves from India to Sri Lanka cheaply. While it served a colonial purpose, it has no utility today unless India is looking to do a colonial move against Sri Lanka.

Though Colonial Britain officially agreed to end slavery in 1833, it never gave up that lucrative industry until after WW2. According to British records close to a million South Indians were brought into the island from 1833 to 1860. It continued well into the 1940s. For all purposes they were slaves who were forced to put their finger print on paper to denote consent to receive meagre amounts of food and were swiftly put on ships or trains and sent to their destinations. Slaves brought from India’s Malabar Coast were classified as Malabar People and slaves from the Coromandel Coast were classified as Coromandel people. In 1911 both terms disappeared from the national census and in their place emerged new ethnic groups.

This large influx of slaves from South India devastated Sri Lanka economically, environmentally, socially, politically and militarily. Instead of useful crops, scant arable land was wasted for tobacco, tea and other crops with massive devastation caused to the environment, catchment areas, native dwellers who revolted against it and to native flora and fauna. Those who came to the island from India with just the clothes on them acquired wealth at the expense of natives over the years in an island with very limited resources. The rise in the wealth of communities brought from India directly corresponds to the poverty of natives as the island nation did not have large amounts of resources for all. Had no colonial population movement occurred, the islanders would have been far better off in every aspect of their lives. 

If a new land connection is built between the two nations it will not be any different – nothing good will come to Sri Lanka through it. If it goes ahead, each community will have to think for themselves and carve up their exclusive ethnicity-based nation each within the island like western Europe did just before it started to develop rapidly. That is the only way they will be safe from the next wave of colonial occupation and slavery.