View Photo Gallery"Among the exports of the island, cinnamon was the most prized. It was luxury so rare as to be a suitable gift for a king, so costly that a crown of cinnamon tipped with gold was a becoming offering to the gods".
Twentieth Century Impressions of Ceylon, Arnold Wright
The cinnamon peelers, the unseen and unsung faces behind this exotic spice descend from people who were of South Indian origin, migrating around 14th century and assimilating with the Sinhala community in the locality. They formed a distinct caste in the caste system of the country based on division of labour, and to date the labour force engaged in the cinnamon industry by and large belong to this particular caste.
In the time of Sinhala kingdom, their labour was a compulsory duty performed in the name of the king. Over the centuries of subsequent colonial conquests and the 50-year post independent era the ownership of land and the industry has changed hands. The cinnamon peeler and his relationship to the land and the crop however, seems to have changed little.
Art of peeling
In official documentations although cinnamon peeling may be classified as unskilled labour, the process of selecting and cutting of the cinnamon branches and the subsequent peeling process in fact requires hands trained for the job. A clean cut across the branches is a prerequisite for growth of fresh shoots. The peeling which follows needs fingers skilled in removing the bark without causing damage to it.
Exploitation and labour relationship
The whole family engage in the process of cutting down the branches and the peeling. This includes the young children who are old enough to wield the knife. When they reach young adulthood these children are already highly skilled in the art of peeling and become the natural inheritors of their elders’ job. Women work shoulder to shoulder with the men in the cinnamon patches, in addition to taking care of the household responsibilities.
Even today labour relationship varies between feudal and semi feudal. The cinnamon peeler has no claim to the land he works. On completion of harvesting a land the families move on to another which will have work, their income being a share from the sale of the spice. This means for the aging peeler a future of complete dependency on his offspring on the day that he could no longer work.
The industry is very much labour intensive to date and little or no modernization could be noticed. Since produce is meant for the international market, the peelers’ income is vulnerable to fluctuation due to prevailing sharecropping system.
A community under threat
On the other hand, today cinnamon lands are threatened by land sale and property developers which would put livelihood of peelers in grave danger.
Added to this is the consequences of the rise in sea level due to global warming. This is slowly turning the land in the southern coastal belt where cinnamon lands are found in abundance, in to barren land.
