Hanusha Somasuunderam and Sri Lanka’s Tea Industry

One of Sri Lanka’s biggest exports is tea. It’s climate makes it a great spot for tea making. In fact, it is the country’s biggest export, employing over 1 million people. If you know Ceylon Black Tea, you know Sri Lanka’s tea, or do we? The industry’s success has come at a cost, a decline in productivity has lowered efficiency of land and thus, tea costs, making being in the industry a greater struggle than it was twenty years ago.

Hanusha Somasunderan’s work humanizes the subject of of the tea maker. Suddenly, they are not just a cog in the machine, a statistic. Whilst being a major part of the country’s tea culture, they become members of family networks, immersed in the mundane rituals of everyday life. Yet it is not one without hardship. Tough living conditions, the challenge of bringing up children in poverty and educating them remind us that even a thriving economy is a double edged sword. Somasunderan takes images strongly associated with tea, including the strainer, bag, and cup and merges them with visualizations of everyday life on the farms. As a teabag makes its stain, the worker’s lives become stained by their struggles.

With the land lacking productivity, the farmers are required to purchase a different strain in order to continue the efficiency of their land. However this strain comes at a high cost, meaning many are forced to turn over the soil with the same crop as before. Productivity levels are low, replanting rates are low and production costs are high. People have become less and less willing to work in the industry. This causes us to question the living conditions of the worker. Does the Sri Lankan tea industry provide them with the tools needed to survive?

Somasunderan draws our attention to these struggles. Through the simplicity of her work, we come to empathize with the tea worker, seeing us in their family, working hard in the fields day in, day out. The objects of the tea ritual have lost their allure, instead becoming symbols of an unfair industry. Now we must use our strainers with guilt, remembering the worker and the journey of the tea to our cups.

However, this is not a story without hope. In 2017 STaRR project emerged to bring Sri Lanka’s tea industry back to life. GPS technology has decreased the time of replanting, giving hope to a rising competitiveness of the market. They also provide aid to those struggling in off-season through intercropping initiatives. Hopefully STaRR will continue to make progress and improve on the struggles that Somasunderan explicitly displays in her work.

Up next, Ethiopia

Image credits to World Art and Memory Museum