Jayaseelan Raj
stipendiat
Institutt for sosialantropologi
Stilling: stipendiat
Telefon:
Mobiltelefon: na
E-post: Jayaseelan.Raj@sosantr.uib.no
Besøksadresse: Fosswinckelsgt. 6
My doctoral research concentrates on the specific socio-historical processes concerning the formation and social reproduction of tea plantation populations in India and in Malaysia. The key focus will be on Tamils who were transported from the Tamil-speaking region in South India to newly-developed colonial plantations in Malaysia and the South Indian State of Kerala as indentured labour. The plantation Tamils, as they are known locally, mostly belong to ex-untouchable/outcaste communities who have been segregated within Indian society for centuries. This outcaste social status allied with the identity of coolie – a lower grouping of manual labour– provided an ideal combination to retain the Tamil labour force into the insulated space of plantations, in a graded stratified structure. But this does not mean that the plantation system is completely unaffected by outside realities. It means that the insulated space and the rigid production relations obstruct rather than prevent the outside realities and thus operates to produce a relatively closed-off system with few alternatives to imagine beyond the closed system. My concentration on tea estate workers addresses a significant section of the international Tamil Diaspora. This community contributed to the plantation labour in the West Indies, in South Africa, and in the Pacific as well as in South and South East Asia. My research, although it will focus on Malaysia and Kerala, will nonetheless be directed ultimately to place the particular in the overall context of the Diaspora.
Regional keywords:
India, Malaysia, Kerala, Tamil Nadu
Thematic keywords:
Plantation System, Indentured Labour/Diaspora, Economic Anthropology/Anthropology of Labour, Caste system/Anti-Caste Movements
Master of Philosophy, University of Bergen, Norway. June 2010. Subject: Social Anthropology of Development.
Bachelor of Arts, Central College, IA, United States. May 2007. Subject: Political Science (Political Economy Track)
Bachelor of Arts, University of Kerala, India. March 2005. Subject: History
PhD research project (Spring 2011-Fall 2013)
“Being in Limbo: Colonial Plantations, Indentured Servitude and the Left-out People in the Plantation frontiers of Malaysia and South India”.
M.Phil. Thesis (2010)
“The Remnants of Colonial Capital: Economic Crisis and the Social Reproduction of Alienation in a South Indian Plantation Belt”. Department of Social Anthropology, University of Bergen.
B.A. Honors research project (2007)
“Deliberative Democracy and Cyberspace: A case of Online Deliberation on Mexican Immigration issue in the United States”. Department of Political Science, Central College, Iowa.