The tempest in your tea cup

Ceylon tea might be distilled down to a popular image, a vision even, of vividly-attired Tamil women. Their nimble fingers sift through the parrot-green flush, effortlessly sweeping two-leaves-and-a-bud into wicker baskets to the rattle and shimmer of gold-and-glass bangles. Their faces are bright with toothy smiles, foreheads blessed with crimson kumkuma. Since the introduction of tea cultivation to the Subcontinent in the second half of the 19th century, visual renditions of women tea pluckers have circulated as widely as the leaves they tirelessly picked. Imprinted on ornate tins of Orange Pekoe to be steeped in bone china tea pots in polite London parlours, or in hand-coloured postcards exchanged between friends divided by oceans, these images have infused tea with a particular enchantment: a feminised mystique.

What is striking, however, is the persistence of such colonial imagery in marketing tropes across Southasia even today. The case in Sri Lanka is no different. Photographs of these women continue to feature in advertising not only for tea, but for luxury tourism and hospitality ventures which seek to market that imperial nostalgia for the strange terrains and peoples of faraway colonies. These invite tourists to relive the opulence of the Raj, as if centuries of conquest might be something one might casually revive. This reminds us of the enduring global inequalities between former rulers and subjects, and long histories of wealth drain. What is disconcerting, moreover, is how the picturesque commodification of colonial nostalgia – in both language and aesthetic – undermines the violence of Sri Lanka's colonial encounter, and the sustained exploitation of estate communities on the island.