During British colonial rule, Arulraj's ancestors were brought from South India to labour on tea and coffee plantations. Their bodies and their labour became the foundation upon which Sri Lanka came to be known across the world as “Ceylon.”
The image of a child in his work does not represent the future in abstraction alone; it reflects his own childhood memories of growing up in a line room that was never truly theirs. Through this figure, he questions whether generational exploitation and inherited labour continue unbroken into the next century.
