ABSTRACT

After her family home outside Nuwara Eliya was burnt down in the anti-Tamil riots of 1983, Vandana “repatriated” to India along with her mother, her two brothers and thousands of other Up-country Tamils, while her father stayed behind in Sri Lanka. In Sri Lanka, dominant ethnic ideologies classified them as too Indian to be considered Sri Lankan, but in India the predominant view was that they were Sri Lankan, not Indian. The vast majority of Up-country Tamils in Sri Lanka today have little direct contact with Tamils in India beyond their mutual consumption of Indian popular culture. Up-country Tamil repatriates went to India primarily due to political persecution in Sri Lanka, though this cannot be totally separated from economic factors. The chapter aims to compare different trajectories of Up-country Tamils in India and Sri Lanka, including one exceptional multiethnic family, to explore how this dialectic interacts with the multiple facets of identity, agency and citizenship in the Tamil diaspora.