Coolies as Malabar’s

Throughout the coffee period Indian workers were described as “Malabar’s” or “coolies” or “malabars coolies”. The misuse of the word “Malabar” has been traced to the Portuguese who used it to refer not only to the people of the Malabar region of India, and the language they spoke, but also to the madras district and to those who spoke the Tamil language. The coffee workers were from the madras province with just “a few stragglers from bambay and a few dhangurs from Bengal”. According to I.M.Cumpston who adds that these categories were “superior in intelligence and activity to the Tamils.” In tracing the history of the word “Malabar”, M.D.Raghavan, an ethnologist, states that the Portuguese misuse of the word to apply to the Tamils was continued by the Dutch who ousted the Portuguese from the maritime areas of Ceylon in the mid-seventeenth century. The Dutch found that the Tamil in Jaffna in the northern province of Ceylon were similar In appearance to the Hindus of the Malabar coast of India and called them “the Malabar inhabitants of the province of Jaffna”. The Dutch codified the customary laws of Jaffna, and after the British had conquered Ceylon from the Dutch, they promulgated (by regulation 18 of 1806) that this code of customs known as the thesawalamai would apply in all lawsuits I which “the Malabar inhabitants of the province of Jaffna” were involved. The south Indian estate workers who spoke Tamil which was the language of the Northern Province also become known as malabars. In a further complication col. Colebrook not only described the Tamils of the northern province as malabars but also described Ceylon as an island which was “originally a Hindu province and from not having been subject to the inroads of the mahamedans, it offers at this day the most perfect example to be met with of the ancient system of Hindu government”. There were no newspapers in Ceylon when the codebook commission visited the island in the late 1820’s but in 1843 the observer which had commenced publication on 4 February 1834 (and is still published) states that not one of the sp-called Malabar coffee workers was from Malabar and that they were actually from tanjare, Madura, tinnevelly, etc. on the coramandel coast. The word Malabar” continued, however, to be applied not only to estate worker but also to the indigenous Tamils of the Northern Province much to their embarrassment. In a lecture at the royal Asiatic society in Colombo in the late 1880’s sir ponnambalam ramanathan, who represented the Ceylon Tamil in the legislative council from 1879 to 891, said the word Malabar had been used to describe Ceylon Tamils “who knew not that word even in dreams”.