'Rotty.'

Image description: Four teabags placed in a row, in white, beige and dark brown shades. Teabags have illustrations of rotty and cooking rotty.

Hanusha Somasundaram

'Rotty.' Tea bags and ink, 32.5x21cm, 2015

“My art is a representative of my society plucking tea leaves endlessly to make your cup of joyful tea. A respectable wage that is still out of sight after heart breaking efforts for generations, a life without the basic human needs and a troublesome childhood with so many barriers. No proper guidance and suffocation by leech bites are all part of my society’s routine life. My country earns from the tea plucked by my society and in return keeps my society begging. My aim through my work is to share their pain with the tea strainers and monthly pay slips as pale witnesses.”

In 2017, Sri Lanka celebrated 150 years since James Taylor planted the first crop of tea. The government spared no expense in promoting this anniversary locally and globally. New websites were setup, a number of celebrations were held, new publications were released, and advertising campaigns launched. Few addressed the enduring violence around the production of tea, and the toll it takes on workers, their families and entire communities.

Hanusha Somasundaram's ‘EMERGENCY’, curated by Saskia Fernando Gallery in March, provided extremely insightful, critical and compelling frames into the lives of Malaiyaha Tamils, of whom we know so little about, but savour and sip daily the labour of.

Over the years, she has remained focussed on the conditions of labour in the estate sector, and in ‘Emergency’, a tea strainer becomes a symbol of the hardships of communities, an existential burden captured quite literally by how tea is strained. An everyday object is transformed into a vehicle to capture and contest the act of making a cup of tea.

This extends to her accompanying work utilising time-sheets, given by the tea factories to their day-wage labourers. The time-sheets provide a really interesting backdrop for drawings capturing various facets of life amongst the Malaiyaha Tamils. The (measly) wages on the time-sheets remind us of the largely parasitical economies that govern tea production, rendering labour as nameless, replaceable objects – almost robotic nodes in a production cycle that glosses over the fact that workers are also mothers, caregivers and breadwinners.

Unsurprisingly, there is a strong gendered lens which Somasundaram employed to critique the economics of tea production – pregnancy, childbirth, children feature prominently, and revealing, schooling and education. Quite apart from the official celebrations of Ceylon Tea’s 150th year anniversary, Somasundaram’s work reminds us that on the ground, much remains the way it was in the previous century, and that the aspirations of those in the estates remain hostage to an industry that still cannot see workers for who they essentially are – human beings.

-Image from SASKIA FERNANDO GALLERY website

-Excerpt from “Looking back at 2017 through four exhibitions,” ARTRA Magazine, 2017