British Colonial Period
The Sri Lankan Tamils were eager to take up the educational and economic opportunities available to them when Sri Lanka was under British colonial rule.
Many of the Vellalar Jaffna Tamils availed themselves of the educational opportunities provided by the colonial authorities & missionaries and together with their hard work earned many government posts offered to locals by the British. In foreign lands under British rule, the British needed obedient, trusted, hard-working and skillful people to take up government posts, mainly as clerks. This led to the first wave of migrations by the Tamils to countries such as Malaysia (then Malaya), Singapore and the then Madras Presidency in India.
Read more about this topic: Sri Lankan Tamil Diaspora
Famous quotes containing the words british, colonial and/or period:
“Among the virtues and vices that make up the British character, we have one vice, at least, that Americans ought to view with sympathy. For they appear to be the only people who share it with us. I mean our worship of the antique. I do not refer to beauty or even historical association. I refer to age, to a quantity of years.”
—William Golding (b. 1911)
“Are you there, Africa with the bulging chest and oblong thigh? Sulking Africa, wrought of iron, in the fire, Africa of the millions of royal slaves, deported Africa, drifting continent, are you there? Slowly you vanish, you withdraw into the past, into the tales of castaways, colonial museums, the works of scholars.”
—Jean Genet (1910–1986)
“It is as if, to every period of history, there corresponded a privileged age and a particular division of human life: “youth” is the privileged age of the seventeenth century, childhood of the nineteenth, adolescence of the twentieth.”
—Philippe Ariés (20th century)