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Colonial Visions, Postcolonial Revisions

Colonial Visions, Postcolonial Revisions Images of the Indian Diaspora in Malaysia

By

Shanthini Pillai

CAMBRIDGE SCHOLARS PUBLISHING

Colonial Visions, Postcolonial Revisions: Images of the Indian Diaspora in Malaysia, by Shanthini Pillai This book first published 2007 by Cambridge Scholars Publishing 15 Angerton Gardens, Newcastle, NE5 2JA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright 2007 by Shanthini Pillai All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN 1-84718-174-0; ISBN 13: 9781847181749

In recognition of the Subaltern grounds within Malaysian Indian Communal History.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgements.......................................................................................... viii Preface ................................................................................................................ix Introduction..........................................................................................................x Chapter One .........................................................................................................1 The Encounter Between Imperial Control and its Labour Force Chapter Two.......................................................................................................17 The Discursive Profiteering of the Coolie by Three Planters in Malaya Chapter Three.....................................................................................................55 Gendered Chambers Chapter Four ......................................................................................................68 Postcolonial Revisions Chapter Five.......................................................................................................82 Transfigurative Diasporic Consciousness Conclusion .......................................................................................................109 Bibliography ....................................................................................................114 Index ................................................................................................................122

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I am grateful to a host of people without whom this book would not have been possible. First and foremost my parents who have always believed in me and the various paths that I have chosen to pursue. At the National University of Singapore, I am grateful to Assoc. Prof. Dr Chitra Sankaran who supervised the Phd thesis from which this book emerges and also to Assoc. Prof. Dr. Philip for his helpful comments that guided my revision of the thesis for publication.

PREFACE

This book is in many senses an aide-memoire to the pioneer Indian immigrants who journeyed to Malaya in the nineteenth century to work and consequently to settled in the rubber plantations that were set up by the colonial government. These migrant workers were mainly from the Southern region of India and were known largely by the term coolie. This word will emerge from time to time in this book. Its history is tied to the sign systems of the colonial past and these were more often than not, derogatory in nature. Many from within the contemporary Malaysian Indian community may take offence at its generous usage in this book. There is a reason for its presence and it is this: to attempt to show that there is nothing demeaning in its usage. What has made it derogatory is the system of signs that were put in place during colonialism. The coolie is only seen as a degraded figure because of the history of representation that is interlaced within this historical folk figure of Malaya. Its high time that we see more than just the downtrodden docile worker of the plantation when we think of this word and see instead, as in the words of veteran Indo-Caribbean historian, Rajkumari Singh, that COOLIE is a beautiful word that conjures up poignancy, tears, defeats, achievements. The word must not be left to die out, buried and forgotten in the past. It must be given a new ease of life (353). This book has been put together to give a new lease of life to both the word and the figure Coolie by venturing to reveal the structures of the sign systems of coolie-ism and the ways in which one can dismantle its foundation through a resistant mode of reading as well as writing, of colonial visions and postcolonial revisions.

INTRODUCTION COLONIAL VISIONS, POSTCOLONIAL REVISIONS: IMAGES OF THE INDIAN DIASPORA IN MALAYA

There are threads of continuity between the pioneer Indian immigrant community that lived and worked in Malaya and the present Malaysian Indian community. These threads are not fragile, neither are they inconsequential. One could argue that they are in many senses the very fibre of the politics of the identity that the Indian community in Malaysia, as there was an enormity in the role that the early migrants played in carving the niche for an overseas Indian to exist on Malayan soil. Yet they appear to be figures that bear no consequence to Malaysian Indian society at present. Could this be due to the fact that they are perhaps unwanted reminders of the humble beginnings of the majority of the Malaysian Indian community? If this is so, might the reason for this be linked to a history of representation that has reproduced a set of images that hinge on docility, a constant amenability to discipline and demoralized outcastes? I posit that these are the main patterns of perception that prevail of the Indian coolie of Malaya and these have been viewed from behind the lens of colonial visions that have never been duly re-adjusted by the nation at large. My contention here is that such essentialisation of the Indian coolie community of Malaya can be readjusted through re-visioning the colonial encounter through both the process of resistant postcolonial reading as well as writing strategies. I begin this journey by first tracing the presence of Indian coolie figures within the terrain of colonial narratives of Malaya. In my reading, I show that though there were many ways in which they were subordinated to colonial ideological discourses, instances of their resistance to these power structures can be found resting within the inner recesses of the text. Yet, what has become the dominant image is that of the coolie as a minion of empire, meek and subdued, in perpetual debt to the planter as paternal benefactor. In my readings of the colonial texts that depict the encounter between planter and Indian coolie, I will show that the discourse of subordination was vigilantly upheld because it suited the colonial ideology of dominance and control and that if we read the latent undertones of such discourse, we just might uncover another story, the

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suppressed story of coolie resistance that lie under the weight of such masks of conquest. Yet, one cannot brush aside the fact that the true voice of the Indian coolie may not be readily accessible as most were illiterate peasants with virtually no way of voicing themselves in printed form. As such, we need to look to those who included these figures within their narrative boundaries and this leads us firstly to colonialist narrative representations of the plantation world of Malaya, that world that the peasants from India migrated to with the hope that they would be building a new life for themselves. As I explore the tones and inflections of the voices concerned however, it will become evident that what may at first seem indomitable expressions of the coolie as an unassertive, incognisant underling of empire are in many ways discursive constructions that reveal lines of tension that mar the smooth imperial countenance of control. For with every accentuation of the labourers docility, there is, ultimately, an underlying tension of anticipated dissension. I thus begin, in Chapter One, at the threshold of the journey of immigration, the embarkation and disembarkation ports. Here I refer substantially to the core texts that were produced by colonial officials in charge of these initial moments of Indian immigration. Among those that will feature prominently are selected reports of the Indian Immigration Committee as well as those by individual agents of the Government of India, sent to enquire into the state of immigration in Malaya. Such an investigation is necessary as the quest for the text of the coolie has to begin at the start of their journey to Malaya. Also, it is within these reports that one is able to find the details of the coolie contract, that script that was to govern their lives for many years. These documents offer an insight into the setting up of the confining structures of imperial discourse that framed the coolies and are thus crucial texts that need to be included. They form the initial passageway into tracing the Indian coolie experience. The treatment accorded to the Indian immigrants within this corridor was not unlike that of the various commodities of the imperial enterprises that they were recruited for. They were seen mainly as production units to be fitted into the larger machinery of labour that awaited them inside the grounds of the plantations of Malaya. I argue that the numerous ways in which the lives of these Indian labourers (or coolies as they were mainly referred to in that era) were dominated by colonial order worked to encase them within various cratelike discursive frameworks. From the confining quarters of the immigrant depots built to hold the labourers as they awaited transportation to the Malay States to the barrack-like living quarters they were allocated and all the minutiae of the colonial plantation experience, one finds that the presiding issue is always the anxiety to preserve the boundaries of control so that the frame is kept intact at all times. The intention of most colonial textualisations was to keep all

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Introduction

configurations of the labour enterprise well within the grasp of imperial power. An important feature of that frame was an almost formulaic docility of the Indian labourer. Imperial control needed such acquiescence, for if it were to discharge outbursts of defiance, the composed visage of control could very well find itself defeated and the flaws in the imperial armour would be exposed. As such, most imperial textualisations of the encounter between colonial control and its conscripted labour force exhibit an almost fixated bid to emphasise the malleability of the latter to the machinations of the former. Docility was part and parcel of the purchase agreement and imperial order was most composed when the labourer remained so. This is exemplified in the ensuing words of Mr C.W. Duncan, Chairman of the Planters Association of Malaya. Advancing the issue of further recruitment of labourers from the South of India for the Malayan rubber enterprise in the Federated Malay States Report of the Indian Immigration Committee Meeting, he states that
through a period of trying years he [the Indian coolie] remained amenable to law and order and generally behaved in a most praiseworthy manner. If he had grievances they were borne passively, and perhaps in no other part of the Empire did its subjects cause less anxiety to its rulers than did Ramasamy here. These qualities should be remembered in his favour in estimating his value to us. (1920: 4)

Colonial authority depended on Ramasamy following this model of compliancy. This dependency was however industriously veiled by a discourse that accentuated instead the Indian peasants destitution and the benevolence of the imperial project in rescuing them from their fate. When we move closer to unpack these primary frameworks of representation, as I proceed to do in the following chapters, the contents inside its casing become inevitably dislodged and they begin to reveal a certain measure of instability in their overall structure. It will become increasingly evident that passivity in the labourer was not a foregone conclusion. Rather, it was a trait that had to be manoeuvred and manipulated by the colonial parties. What happens though when such manoeuvrings failed to have its effect? Colonial control is found in a fractured state as I will show in my first chapter. The next stage in this quest of the narrative of the coolie leads me to texts written by planters themselves. Within their narrative spaces, the details of the drama of dominance and subalternity are played out upon a wider platform that is offered through the license of allegory. The term subaltern was first used out of its military context of inferior ranking soldiers by Antonio Gramsci as he adopted it to refer to the subordinate classes that made up the Italian peasantry in his Notes on Italian History. The constitution of that subordinate class depended on there being always a party that dominated the space within which

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they were situated, a domination that extended also to the configuration of the identity of the represented and the representative (55). The power of representation was almost always in the hands of the dominant. The subaltern is always the one who is represented, never a representative of him or herself. To be the latter he or she must have some form of access to voice within narrativity and that has been virtually nonexistent in discursive history. Most information on the subaltern Indian immigrant stems from what has been written by a colonial or state representative. The politics of such representation served in turn to augment the identity of subalternity at every given opportunity. Coolie figures were often included as minor characters that contribute to the unravelling of the narrative plot of colonial narratives and as the intricacies of the plantation encounter unfold in these discursive spaces, we witness again the tensions that abide in the struggle to maintain colonial control. Chapter two demonstrates this as it focuses on a close reading of three key literary texts that articulate the dynamics of the encounter between the planter and his Indian labour force. They are The Confessions of a Planter in Malaya: A Chronicle of Life and Adventure in the Jungle by Leopold Ainsworth, Pahang: the Saga of a Rubber Planter in the Malay Jungle by Willard C Bush, and Sacrilege in Malaya by Pierre Boulle. Though all three narratives are set in Malayan plantations, the perspectives vary for their authors are from three different countries. Ainsworth is from Britain, Bush is from America whereas Boulle is a French planter. I have chosen these texts because they offer comparative angles to the discourse of domination and subordination that informed the plantation experience of the Indian immigrant community. Significantly, when the author is not as closely aligned to the dominant imperial force, the narrative voice becomes more openly critical of the colonial capitalist enterprise. However, all three narratives invariably demonstrate the laborious effort that was needed for the planters to keep their labour force well within the boards of imperial control as the latter devised ways of crossing boundary lines and claiming more space than what was prescribed for them. The walls of the crates of control, I will duly show, were constantly vulnerable to corrosion. After this initial incursion into the world of the Malayan coolie, I proceed in search of the figure of the coolie woman. Women were often rendered invisible within the imperial design. Yet, they were crucial to the sustenance of not only the labour force itself but more importantly to that of the evolvement of the Indian diaspora that is now a vital part of Malaysia. Chapter three thus proceeds with a discussion of the ways in which Indian coolie women were situated within and subsequently broke out of imposed gendered chambers. The latter draws to a close the colonial articulation of the coolie experience and leads into the postcolonial envisioning (and consequent revisioning) of the same by K.S. Maniam, a Malaysian Indian writer. His is a voice that must be

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included as he emerges from the very community that is the subject of this manuscript, the subaltern Indian coolie community of Malaya. Maniams works offer a tremendous insight into the development of the Malaysian Indian psyche from colonial days to the present. Chapter Four presents the intricacies of the experience of the Indian coolies as a pioneering diasporic community and their many attempts to transplant their Indian cultural legacy, a feat that is shown to be rather impossible unless the hands that sow the seeds are mindful of the soil of the land that they knead. Chapter Five demonstrates the ways in which the latter produces a creative synthesis of identity which releases them from the confines of the historically constraining crate of subalternity. This will be presented through the discussion of certain key motifs from the altar of Indian cultural phenomena in a selection of Maniams works that I see as offering important insights into the ways in which he reconstructs the Indian immigrants of Malaya as choreographers of the diasporic identity that they have left as the most significant legacy for contemporary Malaysian Indians. Maniam has notably been hailed as one of the leading creative writers to emerge out of Malaysia and many situate him as a rather important articulator of the polemics of nationhood. As such, there may be a tendency to see my reading of his works as situating him within a cultural ghetto. However, as I duly show in my close reading of a selection of his works, the very notion of Indian-ness that we see in them is one that reflects openness. The coolie figures who play lead roles within his narrative space were already open to the concept of Malaya as their new homeland and as such I believe that they ought to be given their due place on the mural of nationhood. Also, I would argue too that my discussion of Maniams texts against the backdrop of the cultural motifs resituates the oft repeated refrain of exile that normally accompanies the works of many critics. It is what I would call an altar-native reading of Maniam as I draw on the altar of Indian cultural phenomena and situate myself as a native of the Malaysian Indian community he often writes about. Ultimately, this book takes seed from the belief that any engagement with the Indian diasporic experience in Malaysia must take into account the role of the pioneer Indian immigrants who carved the niche of existence for the overseas Indian on Malayan soil. The main objective of this book is to unpack the various dimensions of the Indian immigrant experience in Malaysia and bring it to the fore of the wider scholarship of the diasporic community as a key text that reflects the polemics of Malaysian Indian identity and its definitions and re-definitions.

CHAPTER ONE THE ENCOUNTER BETWEEN IMPERIAL CONTROL AND ITS LABOUR FORCE

The decision to recruit Indians as labourers for the Straits Settlements was made at a time when the British colonial government was anxious for a supply of labour for the various sugar, coffee and rubber plantations of colonial Malaya. The resource for obtaining this was seen to lie in the southern region of India which was one of the most impoverished. A number of plans were devised to strategically promote the chance of a better life to the mostly famine stricken or debt-ridden Indian villagers in that region. In 1884 an Indian Immigration Ordinance was enacted to aid the migration of these villagers to Malaya and was evidently rather successful in drawing an increasing number of Indian immigrants (Parmer: 19). However, an alarmingly high mortality rate amongst these immigrants drew the concern of the Indian government and consequently, a Labour Commission was set up to conduct regular enquiries into and report on the condition of Indian migration to Malaya. The personnel involved in said Commission were mainly European planters and Straits Settlements Colonial Officials. Meetings were held regularly to monitor the physical condition of labour recruitment and to address any irregularities in the recruitment system. However the focus of these meetings was, more often than not, the grievances of the planters rather than the actual plight of the immigrants that they recruited for the various plantations in the Straits Settlement. Proceedings of the meetings were noted verbatim and stored in the archives of colonial documentation. Each account contains a minefield of information on the subject of Indian immigration into Malaya not only for its socio-historical and statistical content but also for its reflections of the ideology of the time. In many senses, the reports of the Colonial Labour Commission are narratives that tell their own stories of the plantation experience in the Straits Settlements. Interrogations of the tones and inflections of the imperial voices that articulated this experience within the various reports reveal various facets of the colonial plantation encounter and most significant are the colonialist sign systems of the Indian plantation worker (or coolie as they were referred to in

Chapter One

those days) and the politics that were put in play. There is a significant emphasis on the term 'play' here because, in many senses, the proceedings of the Labour Commission Meetings that documented the subject of Indian immigration to Malaya did so in a form that closely resembled that of a staged play. They are in many senses the scripts of empire that staged the drama of the encounter between imperial control and its subordinate labour force and within their pages one finds a cast of characters that have very clearly defined roles. The lead actors are notably the colonialists (mainly members of the colonial governing body and the plantocracy1) and the Indian coolie plays a rather minor part, able only to come to the forefront through the dominating dialogue of empire. This casting was put together with one focal intention, the elevation of the imperialist project, its theatre the plantation world. As Norman Parmer puts it, the intent of the planters was less to improve indentured labor conditions than to obtain the governments participation in importing labor(20). Framed within the sub-plot of empire, the labourers were constantly edged in by prescriptions of subordination, domains that chalked out their characters in images that accentuated their meekness and malleability to colonial manipulation. These are the domains that I envision as the crates of docility, frameworks assembled by the imperialists to keep the Indian labourer of colonial Malaya conscripted well within their tightly lidded casings. The metaphor of the crate can clearly be seen in the initial stages of the migration process. The transportation of the Indian peasants from the port of Madras bore much resemblance to the packing and transporting of cargo goods rather than human beings. They were ferried across the Bay of Bengal to Malaya aboard the decks of steam ships that were really nothing more than large crates of transportation. In the Annual Report of the Government of India in British Malaya, 1926, it is disclosed that
the provision of deck space allowance per adult of 8 superficial feet during fair weather season and 10 superficial feet during foul weather season, enable the shipping of more emigrants frequently resulting in congestion of the deck accommodationfeeding and other arrangements ... are supervised by the travelling immigration inspectors of the labour department of Malaya. (7)

Within its domain, the etchings of subordination are worked well into the discursive framework. Not only are they packed into the hulls of the steam ships like merchandise of empire in exact measured out spaces. The terms of identification in the passage are similarly those used for commodities of trade. The deployment of the term feeding for example is more applicable to livestock, rather than human passengers and furthermore, effectively places them in a dependent mode. They do not eat, they are fed. The description dispossesses them of agency within that structured frame of imperial control that

The Encounter between Imperial Control and its Labour Force

is already set in motion on board the steamers. It establishes the symbol of subjugation and of the power of the hand that feeds the helpless subjects of empire. These are also the hands that purposefully shape the figure of the Indian immigrant into production tools rather than allowing them to determine their part on that stage of empire, as individuals offering their service for the transactions of the imperial capitalist ventures in Malaya. The experience on board these ships became the determining threshold into what was to be a long journey into the recesses of other subaltern encasements, as other patterns of domination and subordination followed in its wake. The presiding designs of these encasements are the various discursive formulations that made up the narratives of the Indian labour experience. As the textual domains are formed, they simultaneously board them up within the boundary lines of the all pervading discourse of imperial control and its mechanisms of power. These were the parapets of the rules and regulations that governed the life of the Indian labourer within the fortress of imperial control that was otherwise known as the colonial plantation. The illustration over the page [Figure 1] befittingly pictures the framing of the discourse of the Indian coolie and the imperial compulsion for control. Being an advertisement placed by the company Imperial Chemical Industries in Tolong Lagi a magazine of the Planters Association, it sketches out the ideal set up of what a plantation was thought to be. The depiction of the coolies strategically placed around the conveyor belt emphasises the factory setting, and the mechanism of control. The belt is the girdle of control that commands the machinery of labour. Each labouring body, assigned to his or her own station around the encircled rubber tree reflects the ordering and dispersing of the signs of imperial control of the labour experience. The frame speaks of the metaphoric structuring of the domain of the imperial discourse of order, the desire for the picture perfect plantation setting.

Chapter One

Figure 1-1: The Rubber Estate of the Future from Tolong Lagi (1933: 56)

The two colonial officials within the picture frame act as the icons of colonial control, always already within any frame that encloses the Indian coolies, sentries of the gateposts of imperial control. Their role is to ward off possible invasions to the guarded terrain, to master the flow of production so that it remains well within their control and to ensure that its form is kept intact at all costs. The figure elevated on the wooden structure above the tree apparently cataloguing the condition of its leaves emphasises the controlling scientific eye, ordering the agronomics of the rubber enterprise. The board with the caption leaf disease department draws attention to the fact that scientific research was a vital part of the exercise of control, for the condition of the trees had to be monitored for the commercial enterprise to succeed. The other (rather

The Encounter between Imperial Control and its Labour Force

irate) colonial figure, ordering the fourth coolie (who is literally tearing out of the frame with the sign of the advertising company in his hands) to get back into the frame, is the controlling commercial eye, whose task it is to see that labour was well ordered and duly placed in their designated positions. Witness too that it is the tree that gains prominence in the picture and the coolies are manoeuvred around its trunk. The coolie manning the conveyer belt dotted with the cups of latex is indicative of the plantation managements desire for the orderly daily tapping exercise. Significantly, the coolies responsible for conveying the produce to the factory are displaced by the conveyor belt. This is a telling demonstration of the objectification of labour. The coolie armed with the can of fertiliser reflects in turn the vital task of providing nourishment for the tree, and the term feeding trough emphasises its personification within that drama of control. The coolies themselves, being mere tools of imperial production, are thus totally divested of their personalities. The female coolie seated on lower ground, tending to the roots of the tree, is reflective of the status of the female population of the work force who were doubly subordinate within the bind of gender. Her presence within the frame is a rare occasion for she is almost always rendered invisible in most colonial documents. The choice of this picture is thus doubly important for she is visibly presented. However, the intricacies of the gendered aspect of the coolie experience will be dealt with in detail in a separate chapter as this concentrates on the unpacking of the general frame that was constructed around it. The positioning of the three figures of the labouring population within the frame exhibits the desired effect of the mechanism of the capitalist venture, assignable stations framed within a well oiled machinery of production. However this is not the whole picture, for revealed too is the wayward coolie tearing out of its margins. The planter standing at the edge of the frame, still ensconced within his desired terrain, shouting for the recalcitrant coolie to get back into the frame with the sign, bespeaks of the urge to regain control of the disrupted sequence of the orderliness within the mainframe. The burst of movement draws attention to the permeable conditions of boundaries and frames. Likewise the literal ripping of the border that is sketched out is indicative of the shredding of the barriers of discourse and interrupting the flow of the circuit of power. It demonstrates that the colonial hold on the labourers was not an invincible one as their signposts of power and order could be, as pictured above, spirited off by the subjects controlled. Just as the absconding coolie is placed at the margins of the frame, so too are inscriptions of insurrection against colonial control inserted at the margins of official reports. Colonial documentation of the commencement of Indian immigration to Malaya illustrates the ways in which the inscription of the figure of the coolie is juggled by various governing officials in their bid to ensure that it fits into their

Chapter One

desired scheme of things. My reading of excerpts from a selection of Labour Commission Reports below will reveal the instability of the myth of the Indian coolies perpetual deference to an all-powerful colonial authority. I do this in two segments. In the first, I look at the ways in which imperial officials assembled the structures of control over the body of the coolie. My overall frame of reference is the Report of the Commission of Enquiry into the State of Labour in the Straits Settlements and the Protected Native States of the year 18902, which collates a vast number of minutes of meetings that took place between colonial plantation officials. Yet I move on to show in the second segment that this very document (along with a select number of others), reveals in the process the instability of the myth of the Indian coolies perpetual deference to what was supposedly an all-powerful colonial authority.

Scripts of Indenture: Initial Encounters of the Coolie


In the initial pages of the RCL 1890, there is an extract of a correspondence of the Secretary to Government of India to the Secretary of Madras. It states, rather clearly, that the immigration of Indian peasants to the Straits Settlement was a purely voluntary movement on the part of the people, stimulated by their own interests and wishes; it was not assisted by any law, neither was it impeded by any law till the year 1857(36). It is interesting that the introduction to the coolies in the document points to issues of mobility and agency in the coolie. It speaks of an active involvement in the act of migration. Early migration appeared to have offered the coolie some amount of freedom of choice. Yet, their docility within Indian society becomes a tool of manipulation for it is subsequently recorded that certain unscrupulous parties were kidnapping a number of Indian peasants and shipping them to the Malay Peninsula (36). What little freedom that the immigrant had is lost at that point, for measures are taken by the colonial authorities to regulate the procedure of immigration. The experience of immigration to and settlement in Malaya from that point on for the Indian labourer is overtaken by defined and exacting measures that etch out the subaltern part that the labourer will play within the various scenes that unfold on the stages of the plantation world. The following passage consequently puts into motion the formal advent of the coolie into the scripts of empire, being a record of the Indian government in Malaya commanding all recruiting agents to
bring coolies intending to proceed to the Straits before Magistrate, at Nagapatnam, and state all particulars as to repayments of cost of passage, moneyadvances, diet during voyage, wages in Straits Settlements, nature of work, duration of engagement, return passage. Magistrate will enter these particulars in a register, copy of which will be sent to the Colonial Secretary to be reduced in

The Encounter between Imperial Control and its Labour Force individual case into a contract on arrival. Magistrate will ascertain that coolies go willingly and with full knowledge of condition. Magistrate will protect natives from crimping, and prevent desertion of families. (RCL 1890: 37)

These recruiting agents were normally employed by the planters in Malaya. They were known as tyndals (later kanganies) hired by colonial planters, mainly Indians who had been labourers themselves and were given the opportunity to promote their status to head-labourer provided they could furnish the planters with enough labour force. They were thought to be apt for the job as they could speak the language and hence would possess the ability to persuade the peasants in the villages of South India to migrate. They offered visions of a more yielding future in the new land, Malaya. Take for instance the following excerpt of a recruiting poster issued in Nagapatnam in 1890 by Ganapathy Pillay and Co., Agents for Planters, Penang: Houses, fuel, and land for gardens will be given free There are shops and a good supply of water. There are doctors who speak Tamil. Rice is sold at market price The country is quite similar to our own places, and comfortable. Many of our own countrymen are working on each estate (RCL 1890: 44). These were in effect fraudulent embellishments of the actual situations in the plantations, with its more often than not unsanitary living conditions and hotbeds of fatal epidemics. This said however, it must be noted that the majority of these Indian recruiters operated within the encirclement of colonialist racial hierarchy and were duty, if not forcibly, bound to serve their colonial paymasters. They were very much caught within the role of the infamous native informants for the dominions of colonial rule, obliged to deliver information to secure power and knowledge of the Indian peasantry3. Their task did not end with mere recruiting. They had also to aid in persuading the prospective coolies to sign the labour agreement or contract which was to formally bind the coolie to the labour enterprise. They were the ones equipped with the language to facilitate this last and with this, the colonial planter ensured that he had fulfilled his responsibility of obtaining the coolies full awareness of the terms he was binding himself to, as stipulated by the Indian Immigration Ordinance. Figure 2 provides a sample of the contract the coolies signed. The controlling force in the contract above is that of the colonial planter and the immigration officials. They are the administrators of its terms and conditions. Precisely how they ascertain the coolies awareness of the full terms and conditions of employment is rather ominous.

Chapter One

Figure 1-2: (From RCL1890: 52)

Could the coolie ever have had full awareness of the terms and conditions of his employment? Firstly, there is the matter of the language of the contract which is in that of the colonial administration, English. The majority of the coolies hailed from the illiterate sections of South Indias rural districts. The passage below sheds more light on the nature of the possibilities of ascertaining the coolies understanding of the contract and the role it would play in their lives:
This contract is practically the only means open to the immigrant of authentically ascertaining the terms of his engagement. He can ask questions of the depot superintendent or the Indian Immigration agent, but few men will do this, and if they do the answers cannot well embody the contents of the twenty-four printed pages of the Ordinance. His only other means of informing himself is to enquire of the recruiter, or read the placards of the recruiting agent. Although a Tamil translation of the Ordinance was made some years ago it has not been published,

The Encounter between Imperial Control and its Labour Force and the conditions of service do not therefore exist in any document to which a scholar among immigrants can refer. (RCL 1890: 54)

The hesitation on the part of the coolies alluded to above stem most apparently from the stature of the colonial administrators and the play of power and dominance. The contract itself is twenty-four pages long and, the wheels of the colonial capitalist enterprise could not afford, in all probability, to halt for lengthy though much needed explanations. Added to this is also the fact that the Tamil translation of the Ordinance was never published. Thus even if there were coolies who could read, there was no avenue to ascertain full awareness of the details of the contract they were signing. Knowledge on the part of the labourer was quite obviously not a priority. The very people who spoke their language and were in fact informed of the conditions that lay waiting kept this information from them. Even the manner with which they await to sign the contract at the ports of the Straits Settlement accentuates the manipulative schemata of the colonial plantation enterprise:
On arrival in Penang, the ship is boarded by the Indian immigrant agent or his Assistant who inspects the coolies and sees that all the deck passengers.. are at once landed and sent to the depot The contract coolies are detained in the government depot until they sign the contracts and are handed over to the agents of the employers for transit to the estates where they are to work. A separate contract is signed for every man and transmitted to the employer for custody. A duplicate in the Tamil language is given to the cooly and the office Register serves as the Immigration Agents record of the transaction. (RCL 1890: 41)

The excerpt lays bare substantial indications of penal codification. The coolies are restrained like criminals within the depot until the contracts are signed and when that is accomplished, it (the original copy) is kept in the control of the planter. The gaze of the imperialist could liberally glide over every exacting measure within these contracts. The labourers unlettered gaze however could never truly engage with it. The choice of the word detained speaks clearly of the status of the coolies within the plantation world. There is also evidence that the details of the contract are interpreted at the will of the employer and often transposed into terms pertaining to prisoners rather than industrial workers. There is for instance the record of a joint and several contract where coolies of a gang signed a common document rendering themselves jointly liable for the default of any one of their number (RCL 1890: 52). Such means accentuate the image of the coolies linked together by the conveyor belt of control as aptly illustrated in Figure 1. In this context the joining is truly literal. It also alerts one to the more sinister state of affairs that

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Chapter One

lie behind the scene of the frame. The breaching of the hold of power does not merely result with the admonition to come back but more importantly to return the signpost of power to its original circle. The ripped margins must be sewn back; the ownership of the sign must be restored for to possess it is to possess the reins of the discourse of power. The coolie must be sent back into the crate that he has fled from. Life on the plantations was designed to confine the labourer within set boundaries. The muster re-enacted every day, is another ritual that served to consolidate the plantocracys command over the labourers. It duly marked their presence down in registers, filed them up according to their categories (the tapping gang, the weeding gang etc) and recorded the results of their labour at the end of the day. The following words of a planter exhibit the commandeering of its mechanism of power:
A roll call is called daily at 6 a.m., in my presence, by the Tyndals, and there are other calls at 10, 1 and 4 oclock. At the morning call everyone on the estate is present: the later roll calls in the field are supervised by the Overseers. I determine myself the amount of task work to be done . (RCL 1890: Evid. 74)

The roll call is the grid of control that assembles them within the framework of their task and consequently marshals them out into the field. The muster and the register both act as critical examinations and preservations of the circle of order that takes on almost mythic propensities within the framework that is assembled. On the trail of such circumscribed manoeuvres is the issue of the coolie lodgings set up by their employers. Known as coolie lines because they were long rows of houses partitioned into numerous cubicles, they were often overcrowded for sometimes as many as ten or more coolies were packed into their frames. They were in most cases practically like crates that had little space and virtually no ventilation at all:
on one estate the building is divided into a number of rooms about 10 feet square, in which six people are usually put. Other rooms in the same building are 20 feet by 14 feet, and in one of these eighteen people were living, men and women indiscriminately. Sometimes three married couples in one small room; in other cases one or two couples, as well as several single men. (RCL 1890: 48)

The demarcation of exact space and the numbers that are lodged within their frames evoke once again the image of goods packed within the frames of commercial crates.

The Encounter between Imperial Control and its Labour Force

11

The conditions highlighted above are only a fraction of those that boarded up the Indian immigrant experience within encasements of docility that were assembled by the various figures of authority that made up the plantocracy that was intent more often than not on extracting as much profit from the labourers. The plantation system was thus run very much along the lines of a factory, with the labourers commandeered to labour meticulously and productively. The desired scene was much like that reflected by the brush of the colonial artist responsible for the colonial advertisement of Figure 1. The discourse that was produced showed the desire for the creation of the ideal picture of orderliness on the stage of their drama of the imperial capitalist enterprise, framed within a setting commandeered by the colonial plantocracy. A cursory reading of the events outlined above may lead to the assumption that these coolies were submissive victims of imperial schemata. It has led to a number of sociohistorical arguments that these labourers were passively dependent on the benevolent colonial master for their every need4. My argument however is that if we delve deeper into the configurations of the scripts that are presented to us, notions of agency become evident deep within their framework. These are the points when we witness coolies resisting and ripping the frames of colonial control, just like that unmanageable coolie in Figure 1. These incidents occur on the cusp of the discursive formations of the Indian labour experience. Here, synonymous with the scene in Figure 1, we glimpse coolies running away with the signs of imperial control. One of the most significant ways in which the coolie dodged the frame of docility that was placed around him was through acts of desertion. This underscores two issues. Firstly, we learn more and more that the coolie never sat in total deference to his colonial master. Secondly, it demonstrates that the coolies actually had sufficient agency to cause anxiety in the planter. By this latter, I mean that planters, as I will show shortly, were often made to reinforce their position by adopting measures that they were often not happy with. Raising wages was one of this. It also caused much friction between neighbouring European planters as coolies would abscond to whichever plantation offered higher wages. Every Immigration report documents a fair number of coolies absconding from the ports of disembarkation in the Straits as well as the plantations. For instance, there is evidence that a number of newly arrived coolies at the government depot at Negapatnam who find themselves engaged on less favourable terms become aware that better can be had, and ultimately refuse to sign contracts unless on better terms, so that those offering lower terms cannot get as many as they want (RCL 1890: Evid. 73). Note how the coolies here have the capacity to actually disrupt the imperialist plan. Because of this, planters saw fit to draw up rather stringent terms in their contracts to forcefully bind the coolie to the plantation:

12

Chapter One without some stronger hold, such as can only be obtained by a legal contract, it is probable that Kanganies and coolies would frequently transfer themselves to what they thought the best market rather than to their legitimate employer. (RCL 1890: 55)

However, many coolies ran away in spite of being aware of the heavy penalties. It ironically becomes the very point of conflict for the labourer who runs away when he is discontented with its terms and conditions5. In many senses this illustrates that the preservation of that very order is dependent on the coolies collaboration with it. Power was never totally in the grasp of the planter for he had to constantly resort to coercive methods to keep the labourer within the boundaries of his plantation. Absconding was already a choice that the labourer knew he had and many took it upon themselves to exercise that right of choice, indicating agency in the body that was assumed to be wholly under the mechanism of colonial control. Malleability in the labourer was thus not an invariable trait but rather one that had to be manoeuvred, and when labourers were not in agreement, colonial control finds itself fractured. Barely five lines from the earlier stipulation for a legal contract cited above, it is subsequently recorded that many employers argue that some system of contract is indispensable, for unless they can be absolutely certain of having a labour force bound to them and at command at certain seasons, there is risk of losing an entire crop(RCL 1890: 55). The term risk highlights the correlative consequences that the coolies have on the running of the plantation enterprise, underscoring the notion that they were not permanent fixtures on the apparatus of control engineered by the plantocracy. Rather, they could become dislodged and consequently rattle the mechanism of the plantation machinery which they were engaged for. Needless to say, colonial order finds itself rattled by the visitations of such disruption. The following words of planter JMB Vermont as recorded in the report indicate the extent to which planters were rattled: When Mr Turner offered his coolies better treatment I was forced to do the same, to a smaller extent; but it was against my inclination. I cannot say whether I got as many coolies as Mr Turner at that time (RCL 1890: Evid.77). Coolies had sufficient agency not only to ensure that wages were raised but also to cause rifts between their imperial masters. It follows thus that they were not docile pawns of imperial order. Then there is also the fact that planters built temples of worship within the vicinity of the plantations to induce the labourers to stay and not stray. Within the pages of another report, Indian Immigration to the FMS: Resolutions and Recommendations of a Commission appointed by the Acting Resident General FMS 1900, it is documented that any increase in the facilities offered for the observation of religious functions must benefit the cause of immigration, because natives will naturally prefer to proceed to a country where they have

The Encounter between Imperial Control and its Labour Force

13

reason to believe that opportunities for observances exist in a form similar to what they are accustomed to in their native land (5). The colonial planters anxiety of coolie desertion is clearly evident here if they felt the need to coerce the labourer to remain in the plantation by using the temple, the seat of his cultural and religious link, as a strategic tool. However, the coolies were not averse to overturning this formula of colonial control. The Annual Report of the Agent of the Government of India in British Malaya 1930 sets down numerous incidents of insubordination of labourers when the boundaries of their cultures are seen to be intruded upon, in similar terms of the following excerpt:
Ten labourers of Parit Perak estate were charged for rioting and assault on the Assistant Manager, who annoyed at the beat of drums, had interfered unnecessarily with a marriage celebration conducted on the estate . (24)

In this sense, the coolie evidently acquires more agency within the boundary markers of his own cultural compound. Colonial control obviously had not much of a stake within this Other frame. These instances of disruptions to the hierarchy of order within the plantation world work to dislodge the image of the meek and docile South Indian coolie. The docile body was not so meek when seen as an agent of its own cultural identity, one that resided within and was an affirmation in many senses of the possession of something that could not be manipulated by colonial control. These select incidents have been significant in compiling the early experiences of the coolie experience. However, the scenes of disruption are not displayed in full form within the pages of such official documentation. As the reports are angled towards building and sequestering the structures of the colonial enterprise, agitations against the prized conduit of power are registered in muted tones, concealing the magnitude of its ramifications to the imperial project. For if the composure of superior governance is to be maintained, the expression of control must not reveal its dissident features. The silenced syllables of thoughts are rendered more conspicuous by its very muteness for it draws attention to what is not or cannot, be said. To articulate it would be to swim against the tide of the imperial discourse. The damming up of what is seen to risk damning the treatise of power ironically acts as a foil to the very exercise of silencing for they speak louder than what is articulated in plain terms on the page. This chapter has been mainly an attempt to unpack and consequently shift the position of the force of imperialist articulations of the Malayan Indian coolies, their bodies mired for so long in grounds of docility. The body of the Indian immigrant has thus far been traced by a language that has accentuated an identification of docility. Almost all other aspects were dissolved under the weight of such markings. These are the images that have been stored away in

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Chapter One

the warehouse of history. Genealogical expositions of the imprints on the historical body of the Indian labourer of Colonial Malaya are highly necessary, for such a process will not only dislodge these firmly packed contents. More importantly, in the momentary spaces that are created through such displacements, other imprints that have been edged out of the historical vision can finally find their way into the mainframe. However, the examples that I have discussed above, while significant, offer only glimpses of the coolie figures as they are more often than not submerged under statistical evidence and production profit margins. It is the realm of colonial literary narratives written by planters themselves that enact more explicitly the dynamics of the plantation world. The following excerpt from a doggerel entitled The Weeding Gang6 demonstrates how literary form was used by them to articulate scenes from their daily lives while revealing too the similar nuances of the precarious discourse of dominance and subordination encountered in the colonial reports examined above:
I love to stand upon a hill And watch my weeding gang until I feel that it is hardly fair To stand and watch them working there.For, when alone, they suck their thumbs And sit about till 'dorai' comes; They need the rest so they can work, Whilst he is watching, with a jerk.Unless he stops too long, he'll see They're simply full of energy. At daybreak, out to work they stroll Their speed kept well within control; Throughout the day perhaps they're slack, But you should see them gallop back! (cited in Money 1989: 42)

Adherence to order is indicated as present only when the gang is observed by the colonial eye. In its absence, they are notably seen to be prone to indolence. While this seems on the one hand to highlight the foibles of the coolies, it exposes too the idea that colonial control was never totally within the hands of the planters. It was something that needed to be monitored and maintained, echoed again in the last four lines. Similar compositions were published frequently and though in form doggerels, they nevertheless portray the mind of the planters constructing the figure of the coolie in a variety of scenes. This fact emphasises that official

The Encounter between Imperial Control and its Labour Force

15

reports were not the only form that they used to construct the figure of the coolie in a variety of scenes of plantation life. It is a fitting introduction to the altering arena of dominance and docility that awaits us in the next chapter as the discussion moves on to explore the colonial narratives written by planters of Malaya. These, largely autobiographical, depict the daily scenes of the colonial plantation and a fair number of them contain dramatisations of the coolie community. Within these various scenes, one witnesses a broader display of the politics of the performance of the encounter between imperial order and its seemingly subordinate labour force and the extent to which the coolies transformed the sign-system of docility configured by their imperial masters.

Notes
a term that I use to refer to the almost aristocratic role the colonial planters played in the plantation realm. 2 Hereafter RCL 1890 3 The view commonly held of these recruiters is that they were fraudulent manipulators interested only in financial gain at the cost of the impoverished and ill-informed labourer. However, the role they played within the plantation system was rather ambivalent. Though they admittedly brought the labourers under false grounds, they became rather paternalistic in their attitudes towards their charges and were soon seen as the asian king within the realm of the coolie world. The planters were aware of this and tried as far as possible to curb the power that they held. A detailed explanation of the polemics of this can be found in Frank Heiddemanns Kanganies in Sri Lanka and Malaysia: Tamil Recruiter-xum-Foreman as a Sociological Category in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Century (Munchen:Anacon-Verlap, 1992). 4 Two key scholars are Kernial Singh Sandhu and S. Arasaratnam. The first produced what has been lauded as a seminal work on the nature of Indian immigration into Malaya and their socio-historical development. However he states rather rather explicitly that the labourers every need was taken care of from the time of immigration: the labour movement was predominantly an arranged one in that almost every step of its movement from its home in India to its place of employment in Malaya was arranged and taken care of by someone else. Thus there was little or no spontaneity about it and much less a call of adventure or service. (Sandhu 65). Arasaratnams text operates in the same manner too as he emphasises the passivity of the Indian labourer amidst the capitalist enterprise of the imperial plantations: The Indian labourer, from the time he made the decision to emigrate to Malaya, had someone to attend to his cares, and had things done for him. The whole process of shifting from his village to the depot, across the seas to Penang and thence to the estate, went on under the watchful eye of someone who was responsible for him during this entire period he grew up in a situation where he had no necessity to take sustained action of his own behalf. (Arasaratnam 1970: 135-136) 5 According to P. Ramasamy between 1912 and 1920, a number of labourers of various estates in Malaya staged walk-outs as they were unhappy with low rates or delayed
1

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Chapter One

payment of wages, high mortality rates, managements unkept promises and the generally unsanitary living conditions. The planters however, incensed at such insubordination, arranged to have those very labourers charged and jailed by the police for contravening the terms of their contract. When they were released later, they were reported to have made it clear that they preferred to stay in jail or even walk into the sea and be drowned than to return to the oppressive estates (1992: 101-102). Where is the figure of the docile malleable tool of empire in all this? 6 This doggerel was originally published in the planting communitys official bulletin The Planter, and subsequently reproduced in John Kyrle Moneys Planting Tales of Joy and Sorrow (1989), an anthology of various plantation stories and anecdotes. It was composed and submitted to the above mentioned magazine by a planter in the year 1934. The author is identified only, as the editor of the anthology states, by the initials F.H.F.

CHAPTER TWO THE DISCURSIVE PROFITEERING OF THE COOLIE BY THREE PLANTERS IN MALAYA

The colonial plantation was not merely a site that provided the raw material needed for the transactions of the economic enterprise of imperialism. It also provided a plethora of material that the planter often used to shape imaginative textualisations of the dialectics of the plantation experience. The doggerel that we looked at briefly in the concluding part of the previous chapter, a form of comic verse, was just one example of the way in which planters often used the form of literary writing to articulate the setting of the plantation world. A number of these planters actually wrote works of fiction (which were mostly autobiographical in nature) chronicling the various accounts of their experience of the Malayan plantation world. Laura Marcus has argued that the value of autobiographical discourse
is seen to lie in its insider quality: the autonomous status of autobiography is based on its separation from forms of history writing, where history was and is defined as an objective, documentary approach to lives and events. Psychological and philosophical issues filled the space left by the rejection of history. (1994: 5)

In the previous chapter, I established that historical renditions of the plantation experience were never as objective as purported. Added to this is also the notion that there were always missing links to the narratives that were recorded about the plantation experience. The story of the coolie was always put forth in reductionist terms. By this I mean that we never encounter the philosophical and psychological issues that Marcus refers to. The data that was invariably inserted into the pages of official log books of the various Immigration Committees were presented with a dispassionate tone. However, in spite of this, there were many instances of underlying subtexts. What more then of autobiographies written by planters, where the additional psychological and philosophical viewpoints that Marcus speaks of make their way into the narrative framework?

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Chapter Two

The first two narratives that I investigate in this chapter, Leopold Ainsworths The Confessions of a Planter in Malaya: A Chronicle of Life and Adventure in the Jungle and Willard C. Bushs Pahang: The Saga of a Rubber Planter in the Malay Jungle are both autobiographical in nature. Their writings were as much for the development of the self as it was for the print media. They bring to the fore many fundamental (and often conflicting) issues regarding the nature of the plantation labour system and the people they presided over. The third text, the English translated version of Sacrilege in Malaya by French planter Pierre Boulle, is however, not in the autobiographical mode but is rather a novel, narrated in the third person. Perhaps because its focus is not on a single persona (like the autobiography), the space of its narration offers more room for the coolie community. In fact, as we will note, the novel portrays in detail the dynamics between the planting officials and their coolies. Narrative form is not the only variant. The writers are themselves from three different countries. Ainsworth is British and his text offers the perspective of a young British planter and his rites of passage into the little kingdom that is the rubber plantation. Bush is, interestingly, an American who, intrigued by the stories that he has heard about Malaya, sets sail for the British protectorate and ends up applying for the position of an assistant manager of a rubber plantation as soon as he arrives. What is even more interesting is that, because Bush is American and thus not bound by an obligation to the British crown, he openly questions the structures of the colonial capitalist system. The third writer, Boulle is French. His text, an English translation of the original French version, is as complicit with the structures of imperialism as Ainsworths, for France was another colonial power that was actively involved in the rubber industry. In fact the rivalry between the British and the French is very much apparent in Boulles text. The three texts will demonstrate how the features of the plantation world were transformed as the imperial project grew from the founding plantations of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, few and far between and isolated by the edges of the Malayan rainforest, into the scores of conglomerates that administered groups of plantations in the later years. Most significant however is the fact that the allegorical license of literary writing grants the planter a dual reign of control. It allows him to dominate both material and discursive space and consequently provides a larger platform for the expansion of the fractional scenes of the play of dominance and subalternity that one witnesses in official colonial documents. In all three narratives, the power invested in the art of narration becomes an important tool of Othering. The body of the Indian coolie is not only employed for the running of the plantation but is also gainfully engaged for the exploration of the encounter of Self and Other. In the process, we find that any trace of audibility of the coolie is either effectively muted in illegible terms or reduced to inconsequence.

The Discursive Profiteering of the Coolie by Three Planters in Malaya

19

This is notably best viewed against the backdrop of JanMohameds concept of the economy of Manichean allegory that he sees as characteristic of most colonialist narratives in articulating the opposition between the putative superiority of the European and the supposed inferiority of the native (2000: 1059). The term that is derived from its original employment by Frantz Fanon to refer to the dichotomy that informs the relationship between colonisers and the colonised, (good versus evil, the adult versus the child etc) is extended by JanMohamed to embrace the economic feature:
Just as imperialists administer the resources of the conquered country, so colonialist discourse commodifies the native subject into a stereotyped object and uses him as a resource for colonialist fiction. The European writer commodifies the native by negating his individuality, his subjectivity, so that he is now perceived as a generic being that can be exchanged for any other native (they all look alike, act alike and so on). Once reduced to his exchange value in the colonialist signifying system, he is fed into the Manichean allegory, which functions as the currency, the medium of exchange, for the entire colonialist discursive system. (1060)

The issues raised in the passage above are doubly executed in the colonial narratives that I investigate in this chapter. They emphasise the nature of colonial writing as similar and interrelated with the economic manipulation of the colonial capitalist venture. Both deal with commodities of empire. The Malayan land becomes the source that is commodified for the imperial enterprise. It provides the nourishment for the imported commodity of the millions of rubber trees that were planted. In the process however, much of its characteristic topography was defaced in the sense that large expanses of forestland was cleared to make way for the invader commercial crop. These were generically sustained entities, planted in rows of exact measurement, each an identical version of its neighbour. On the heels of this invasion, come another imported mass of beings, in the figures of the Indian plantation labourers, bodies obtained in transactions for the capitalist project of rubber in Malaya. They too had their own individualities negated when they were herded like cattle in immigration depots and transported in ships that were also fit more for livestock than live human beings. Their status within the schemata of the colonial plantation was thus that of imported tools of empire. Their bodies were utilised as commercialised resource controlled by the officials of colonialist capitalism, both the governing administrators as well as the planters. As a number of the latter were avid contributors to the colonial literary scene, their works demonstrate how the body of the coolie becomes fully utilised in both the material and literary world. It becomes fodder not only for the imperial economic project, but also for the

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Chapter Two

literary projection of the colonial self and its Others. The value of these Indian immigrant labourers lies in what can be seen as the currency (to use JanMohameds term) of the stereotype of malleability that the imperialists appropriate as theirs. This is concurrently disseminated within the realm of the colonial discursive system by the conveyor belt of the economy of Manichean allegory. However, close readings of the narratives ultimately reveal that the operation of this Manichean belt was never quite totally within the control of the colonial planters, as much as they struggled to maintain it so. Here the discursive formations not only reflect the same struggle to keep the coolie within the boundaries of imperial frameworks of control but show too the coolie was in many ways utilised to prop up the structures of that very frame itself. By this I mean that he was often the brace for the preservation of the stature of the white planter as hero and saviour. The stability of this brace was naturally heavily dependent on the coolie remaining fixed within the constructed sign of malleability. Hence the planters had to struggle, in much the same manner as the governing officials to maintain their position and it proved never to be an effortless task. This struggle, I suggest, can be seen in terms of a project of discursive profiteering. The planters, as authors, employ the body of the coolie in the bid to prosper as superior and thus dominant white masters of their colonised subjects. In the process however, there was always an accumulative deficit in their account of Self versus Other. Many of the planters in colonial Malaya were young men intent on seeking their fortune in the east and most started out as subordinates within the hierarchy of the plantocracy. As Stephen Dobbs writes,
While most men who became planters in Malaya had middleclass backgrounds similar to other Europeans who took up careers in the Straits Settlements, the level of their education tended to be lower than that of other groups such as the Colonial Service. It was also often the case that the man who took up planting had already tried his hand at some other occupation and had been unsuccessful.. Malaya and rubber planting provided an opportunity for men of middle and lower middle class origins to make a fresh success of their lives. (2002: 8)

Two out of the three writers that I look at, Bush and Ainsworth, are planters not unlike those described in Dobbs passage. Both men journeyed to Malaya to seek a fortune of their own. These fledgling planters or creepers1 as they were referred to were often made aware of their subordinate position by colonial governing officers as well as the senior planters that they were assigned to. This often created a need to elevate themselves in the eyes of their subordinates, the coolies that they were put in charge of. The most profitable allegorical relation was naturally that of the imperial rescue drama.

The Discursive Profiteering of the Coolie by Three Planters in Malaya

21

In their introduction to Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World, Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler write, [t]he colonies of France, England and the Netherlandsmore ambivalently, of Spain and Portugaldid more than reflect the bounded universality of metropolitan culture: they constituted an imaginary and physical space in which the inclusions and exclusions built into the notions of citizenship, sovereignty and participation were worked out (1997: 3). The Malayan plantation was one of these spaces upon which the rites of inclusion and exclusion were exercised. Colonial planters clearly built upon codes of conduct that ensured that their governing space remained inaccessible to those they ruled over. They became markers of the Magna Carta of the imperial plantocracy, where the planters were the sovereign citizens and the migrant Indian labour force their refugees. Yet, as the writers add, In Africa and Southeast Asia, the inconsistent efforts of colonial regimes to encourage peasant production at one moment and to subordinate peasant to plantation regimes at another ran up against resiliencies that were neither anticipated nor controllable by French, British, and Dutch states (5). The three colonial texts that I investigate in this chapter depict such scenes of dissension, attesting to the fact that the composure of imperial control was continually subject to alteration by resilient labourers. They prove there were never iron clad guarantees to an invincible colonial reign. Each narrative exhibits the sporadic erosions to the columns of colonial control as coolies intermittently stepped out of predetermined boundaries. In the process, I show too that the authors display a varying degree of conflict with the capitalist enterprise that they were involved in. Interestingly enough, the first of the three narratives has the word confessions as part of its title. In keeping with the OEDs definition of confession as a making known or acknowledging of one's fault, wrong, crime, weakness, the narration does disclose a certain level of uneasiness with the colonial plantation regime when he is first initiated into its realm. However, this slowly disappears as he becomes, in time, more collusive with its ideological foundation, as I will show in the course of my discussion.

Shifting frames of a Planters Confessional: Leopolds Ainsworths The Confessions of a Planter in Malaya
I was eighteen years of age, and had recently been working in the offices of a large tea and rubber brokers in London, until fate had suddenly played one of her queer jokes and decreed that my life should travel along very different lines to the one on which it had been running till then she sowed the seeds of ambition and unrest in me at the same time, the result being a sudden and most violent revulsion of feeling towards the cramped indoor life of an office-wallah coupled

22

Chapter Two with a wild desire to be in the open, tackling a mans job which would lead to something worth while. (15)

These words from the introductory chapter of Leopold Ainsworths autobiographical narrative The Confessions of a Planter in Malaya published in 1933 set the tone for the unfolding of his adventure in the Malayan land. The narration sees him discarding the subordinate role he has in the British company, transgressing from mere office-wallah (a term that highlights his subordinate role as it was one that was normally used to refer to native servants of the British Raj) to a creeper and finally managing planter-ruler of what was in many senses the little kingdom that was the Malayan plantation. Interestingly enough the subjects of that plantation kingdom that he will come to preside over journey to Malaya for a betterment of their lives too, only the imperial divide works to edge them into other forms of subalternity. Weve seen that the sea journey for the Indian immigrant labourers was one that cramped them on board crate-like vessels, with no proper sanitation, herded into a common deck-space. Ainsworths journey is notably different. In rough weather, he has the luxury of retiring to the comfort of a bunk and the seclusion of a cabin as it was impossible to walk on the decks, and the few passengers who had not retired to bed were forced to remain gloomily imprisoned in the lounge or smoking-room(24) . Such individual space was a luxury that the Indian coolies never possessed on their journey or within the plantations that they were transported too. They were always a mass of Ramasamys and Muniammahs, always referred to generically so in most narrative accounts (the former for male labourers and the latter for the female half). One can only begin to imagine their experience of the rough monsoon weather, cramped on board the common decks, no luxury of a cabin to retire too. The fact that imagining is the only option as there is no record of their experience to which we can refer too is an important statement of the largely invisible and voiceless nature of the coolies journey to Malaya. Yet, the presence of such writings by colonial planters provides inroads into collating a fraction of what the coolies would have had to undergo. This would of course have been clearly far more uncomfortable than what the colonial would-be planters experienced, if the latters description of his sea journey is anything to go by. Likewise, Ainsworths journey inland to the plantation provides similar glimpses of what the coolies journey may have been, as he describes his transportation first by river boat, and then bullock cart on towards his final destination (30 -35). However, once he is drawn up to the entrance of the managing planters bungalow, and stands at the threshold of what would become his dominion, the narrative begins in full form, and we follow the changeover of the subordinate office wallah to the dominant white male planter.

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23

On his first day at work Ainsworth learns at muster that there were always a certain number of malingerers who tried to shirk work half the days in the month, and it was essential that these must be driven out to work(44, emphasis mine). It is a statement of what appears to be a recurrent problem that the planters face. The notion that the coolies had to be forced to comply with their orders is in itself evidence of the failure of colonial control. Driving them out to work was not without its problems though and again insubordination rears its (problematical) head as Ainsworth experiences first hand the rather painful consequences of such acts of reprehension:
the man I had roused so rudely had crept up behind me while we were talking and was at that instant about to smash my head in with his short-handled hoe hardly without knowing what I was doing I rushed in close and upper-cut him on the jaw as the hoe descended. It grazed me as he went sprawling to the ground It taught me a lesson and in the future made me careful not to turn my back on these men after dragging them out of their beds. (46)

The incident demonstrates insubordination on various levels. The fact that there were always these individuals or malingerers as they are referred to (a military term that emphasises the military regime of the plantation life) is proof of the coolies dismantling of the sign of malleability that the colonial constructs around them. There was no generic Ramasamy. He was a host of contradictions, an individual entity forced into a stereotypical role that he obviously could circumvent. Another issue that is evident in the passage is that of the need to be constantly vigilant of defending ones own back from possible ambushes such as the one Ainsworth was subjected to. This introductory drama illustrates the dilemma of encouraging labour productivity while simultaneously dealing with resistance to such efforts as certain coolies had other ideas as to their status within the colonial plantocracy. Ainsworths response to his introduction to this world is summed up as such:
The mornings events had given me much food for thought, as I had no idea until then that our labour force was to all intents and purposes comprised of slaves conveniently camouflaged under the Officially approved sounding title of Indentured Labourer and the knowledge amazed me. (47)

It is the first of his confessions of a latent reservation of the imperial capitalist project that he is to help preserve as he questions the nature of its slave-like foundation. This discloses evidence of an imperial deception as the indenture system is masked to belie its fundamentally feudal features. Ainsworths depiction of the problems that dog the heels of such a deceptive system (of

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reluctant labourers) reveals too that such signs of servility are a construction of imperialism. Their workforce often proves to be more intractable than what they expect much less desire. The very voicing of a dire need for vigilance over the labourers points to the fact that these subjects of empire have problems with their treatment as slave labour. This consequently becomes an obstacle for the planter as his role is to ensure optimum productivity, a factor that cannot be achieved if faced continually with such defiant behaviour. The formula of colonial control, we know, cannot work without the collaboration of the colonised subject. As Ainsworth tours the grounds of the estate with a fellow creeper during the course of that first day and approaches the coolie lines, he witnesses the scene of a young Tamil woman, tied by her long hair to one of the uprights of their house, and being beaten with a stout cane, while she uttered the most blood-curdling yells and moans as each cut of the cane made its great weal on her soft skin (49). His first instinct, he writes, is to intervene, but he is stopped by his colleague who informs him that such an act would only be resented by both the man and his wife, and would be likely to cause trouble (49). This reiterates the importance of the collaboration of the coolie within the plantation world for discontentment would disrupt the scheme of production. It proves that outside the boundary of the fields, the colonial has no right to intervene. It is interesting to note however, that though Ainsworths indignation at the scene of that domestic violence seems to arise from a humanistic interest, it is ironic that his very depiction of the woman in question works only to dehumanise her (she emits blood-curdling yells) and subsequently, her pain is portrayed in erotic terms, as her soft skin is the focus of his attention. The incident highlights that control and intervention of the colonial was relevant only in certain contexts and that the coolie community did have their own notions of personal (and cultural) space. On another level the episode emphasises too the notion of the relativity of the condition of subalternity and the vicious cycle of domination and subordination that can render the victim the victimiser. Just as the novice young planter achieves an elevation within a domain where he dominates (the plantation), so too does his subordinate labourer achieve a similar status when he steps into the private space of his home. There, the male coolie exercises the power that he lacks in the public space of the plantation work field on the body of the coolie woman. In that tiny space, he becomes the dominator. This minor scene in Ainsworths narrative acts as an important window into the whole issue of gender relations and the status of the Indian immigrant woman within the plantation world, the ramifications of which shall be dealt with in detail in the next chapter. In general, scenes such as these point to the interchangeable realm

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of dominance and subalternity and that the garb of dominance can also be worn by the subaltern. The narrative flow subsequently moves back into a stand that re-establishes the abjectness of the Indian labour force, in order for the colonial plantocracy to emerge dominant again. Ainsworth, being part of that colonial order, writes in part as its advocate. The Tamil to him was a poor specimen, both in physique and morale, and of being abject, cowardly and generally lacking in vitality (55). Yet, as this wretchedness is highlighted, he admits that it is the very feature that makes them undoubtedly the most important (56) of the labour force. It was an essential ingredient in the formula of colonial control. He also alludes to what he deems is a rather extraordinary ability of these labourers to economise on their wages despite being the lowest paid section of the labour force and are actually able to save up sufficient money for their periodical trips to India (57). At the same time, his following words reveal the underside of the imperial capitalist venture that was the plantation enterprise and his uneasiness with its latent misanthropic features, as contained in his following words: When one compares these daily wages with those of even the lowest paid of our own countrymen, one wonders how they can possibly exist as ordinary human beings (57). Such feelings crop up again when he is forced to help in the delivery of a baby on the grounds of the estate, the Indian mother having gone into labour in the middle of her work task (61). Perturbed by the incident, he relates it to his manager and is somewhat taken aback that
the news seemed to leave him cold, and his only comment was to the effect that he hoped all work had been completed, and if not, that I had fined those who had left theirs unfinished. Such indifference made it difficult for me to readjust my views on life, and I found it astonishing and puzzling in the extreme ... (61-62)

Again, we witness his qualms about the plantation system, reading as yet another deeply questioning statement of the inhumane features of the imperial scheme of things. Yet, such reservations do not last very long as the discourse of imperial ideology inserts itself into the narration. He defends the response of the manager within the next few lines, asserting that to be an efficient planter had to be extraordinarily versatile and able to tackle all manner of jobs, from roadmaking to midwifery, without undue concern (62). The key point here is that efficiency was to be the order of the day and human problems were but part of the machinery that ran the plantation world and thus had to be treated as such. However, the fact that rules and regulations had to be enforced on the coolies in order to make them toe the line in itself discloses the ever present threat to colonial authority in the form of insurgency.

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The following two scenes demonstrate the full ramifications when the labourers express their dissatisfaction with their superiors, the first acting as a prelude to the chaotic dissidence that is encountered in the second. The root of such dissension stems from a rather important day for the coolies, pay-day. Ainsworths first experience of pay-day was as he terms it memorably troublesome as he had apparently debited some of the women with the shopdues and fines of others answering to the same name. He proceeds to defend himself by reasoning that considering that at least ten of them possessed the name of Muniammah, while as many shared the name of Poonama, such mistakes were to be expected from a new-comer, unable to speak the language fluently and unaccustomed to memorizing numbers of persons with similar names(63). However, judging from the rather irate responses of the affected section of his labour force, the coolies are already aware of what payment is due to them. His errors are pointed out without hesitation and in rather querulous tones: I do not believe that any living being can make more noise than one Tamil woman who imagines that she has been underpaid, and unjustly at that (64, emphasis mine). The episode highlights certain interesting issues. Firstly, the notion that these women are indignant at the planters obvious muddling of their identities emphasises their own concepts of individual identity which the former obviously dismisses. Ainsworth sees them only as generic beings. Muniammahs and Poonamas are interchangeable to him. In addition, his usage of the word imagines in the passage notably works to deflect from the real issue, his mistake, as its presence works to disprove the Tamil womens opinion (and they are depicted to be strongly argumentative). Witness how the power of narration is used to effectively render their side of the story inconsequential. However, Ainsworth is unable to successfully silence them (the noise became terrifying) and has no other recourse but to solicit the aid of one of the Indian kanganies: I stood by lost in admiration as he [the kangany] wore those women down by an unending tirade and sheer volume of voice, under which they gradually subsided into vague mutterings as they left the scene of action and returned to their lines (64). The vanquishing of the dissident individuals is not so much a victory of colonial power but rather a demonstration that such power is only availed through the collusion of members from within the labour force itself, the kindred sentries employed by the planters to maintain the much needed subordination of the labour force. The over-arching theme of the interchangeable domain of dominance and subalternity is very much in evidence here, for the kanganys subaltern status in his relationship with the planter transforms into a dominant one when he deals with the coolies who are under his command.

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Concurrently, another group of labourers, this time from the male population of the labour force, demonstrate their dissatisfaction with delayed payment of wages. However, this is executed in a more vehement manner, as they refused to budge [to the fields] till they had received their pay and started to knock the wooden handles from their hoes in readiness for a fight (69). In this instance, the problem is handled by Ainsworths superior, the manager of the estate. He arrives quivering with rage and bursting with threats which he at once put to action as he engages the help of two Sikh watchmen to obtain rifles for him (yet another exposition of the collaboration of the colonised in maintaining colonial order) and that of his two creepers, Ainsworth and his colleague, getting the latter to cover the mutineers (71). The last term fittingly encapsulates their bold act of insurgency while the description of the manager shaking with rage emphasises his loss of self-control. The latter points to the vulnerability of the dominance of self over Other as much as it exhibits too that the coolies have enough agency to induce this lack of composure. The revolt is worn down by the managers sheer determination to beat the stuffing out of them for insubordination and they finally march off to the fields. The incident illustrates the physical prowess needed by the colonial authority to maintain their dominance. Mere words alone do not suffice in the face of such insubordination. While the rebellious gang is sent off to the fields with no further trouble (though Ainsworth is warned to expect some), the kangany in charge of that group is not so easily cowed (stemming also perhaps from the fact that these individuals were often given more staying power to help maintain colonial order)2. He makes no effort to hide his displeasure at the way things were handled and Ainsworth anticipates further trouble and consequently raises his fears with the manager. The latter decides to curtail any further occurrences of insubordination by clearing all of the kanganys belongings, setting them on fire and concludes his revenge by terminating his employment. Ainsworth's response to this reveals again his latent reservation of such imperial authoritative methods:
Such a drastic form of punishment astonished me, and although I admired the bold and decisive way in which any form of rebellion was put down, it seemed to me that to burn a mans entire worldly possessions and then beat him off the estate without his gang, was a distinctively vindictive action and somewhat unnecessary. However, I have no doubt that the manager was right, for such acts of revolt require very drastic measures if they are to be of any lasting good (71)

It stands as yet another exposition of the brutish feature of imperial order, as maintaining its authoritative stand depended heavily on the use of brute force, and was thus never a given right much less privilege of their rulership.

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The fact that Ainsworth questions the necessity of such violent manhandling while he simultaneously feels obligated to defend its application speaks of what Edward Said terms as the troubling self-images (1994: 76) that imperialist ideology produced in the majority of its team players. It is deeply reminiscent too of Conrads infamous justification of the redeeming idea of imperialism. As Said himself asserts in relation to this troubled view of Conrads, there were
two different but related aspects of imperialism: the idea [of imperialism] that is based on the power to take over territory, an idea utterly clear in its force and unmistakable consequences; and the practise that essentially disguises or obscures this by developing a justificatory regime of self-aggrandizing, selforiginating authority interposed between the victim of imperialism and its perpetrator. (82)

These two aspects are similarly present in Ainsworths depiction of the colonial plantocracy. In obscuring its brutality with justificatory statements, he redeems and defends their position as practitioners of the idea of imperialism. They are what William Appleman William calls the self-appointed benevolent progressive policemen of imperial ideology (qtd. in Said 1994: 76). Hence, while the reaction of the manager of the estate is seen to be rather brutal, its method is nonetheless justifiable for the greater good of colonial concerns. Authority must be maintained for the capitalist machine to function properly. Yet, as weve seen also, the subjects of empire that are needed to prop up the hold of colonial ventures could never be fixed within that role, as much as it was desired by their masters. Colonial planters often forgot that their generic labourer was an individual with his or her own sense of identity. One of the features that often perplexed the former was that of culture. The passage below, being Ainsworths description of the coolie communitys celebration of Tivali, expands upon the issue of the subaltern transgressing the sign-system of cooliesm:
All the world seemed to have gone mad, and the usual humble and downcast Tamil had become a different being: with new cloths, hair and body oiled, he stood for once in a truculent attitude, shouting at the various vendors and enemies. (83)

The docile labourer that the planter encounters in the course of the day is transformed into a realm that the planter cannot recognise, or has trouble recognising because his production machine has stepped out of the frame of control. Often, it is within the realm of religion and culture, ironically encouraged by the plantocracy itself, that the grip of imperial control is disabled. The planter has no place within the labourers religious sphere. In a

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sense, it is the one place where he is the Other. Ainsworths description of his presence along with the creeper and the manager as three very self-conscious men perched up on a small platform, looking more like an exhibit at a fair rather than the supervisory staff of a plantation(81) is a testimony of this Othering of the colonialist. Not only are their production tools unrecognisable, but rather the planters are themselves altered by the unfamiliar scene. As such, the signifiers of the plantocratic regime were inevitably predisposed to modifications, demonstrating that though imperial control was framed around a rigid structure, its grip was never totally secure. Subalternity was never a fixed position and within their own realm, the coolies evidently have their own sign systems. However, to counter this uneasiness and regain his composure, Ainsworth immediately refers to the infantile nature of the coolies: The head kangany poured out for each of us a glass of half beer and half brandy, of which we helplessly took a drink rather than offend these childlike people at their festival (81). While on one level it demonstrates the plantation politics of keeping the labour force contented, on another level, the incorporation of the infantilising discourse upholds the justification for imperial control of the coolies. As Ainsworth is given more responsibility in the running of the plantation, various other incidents continue to reveal the ways in which control had to be habitually mustered over the coolie community as a whole. There is the matter of disease control within the plantation. The outbreak of cholera was often a serious problem for the planter, for it meant the possibility of accumulative loss of coolie lives. This equated to a substantial loss of profit as the coolies were important production tools for the running of the plantation enterprise. The more coolie lives that were lost, the more money the planters lost in the process. The only way they had of containing the outbreaks was to isolate the plantation and the affected coolies. However, even in this context, the coolies reactions, as seen below, were anything but submissive:
Such drastic steps naturally produced a great deal of trouble amongst many of the coolies, who strongly objected to what they considered a restriction of their freedom, with the result that I had a number of unpleasant punishments to administer. (88)

In spite of Ainsworths posting of watchmen at the boundary markers of the estate, there were still defiant individuals. This is symbolic also of the resistance to the boundaries of colonial power. Yet again, colonial control is defeated by obvious insubordination, exhibiting that these coolies were obviously not meekly amiable to its hold, if they possessed the capacity to make their objections clear. The punitive nature of the planters authority only serves to exhibit once again that control was always vulnerable to acts of resistance and

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the only means they had of defending its structure was through the use of force. His word was not rule of law; it had to be reinforced through physical might. From this point onwards, we detect a change in the persona of Ainsworth. Meting out punishments now become a normal occurrence for him, exhibiting his full collusion with the self-aggrandizing authority of the imperial regime and the culmination of his role as the progressive policeman of its ideology. This is correspondingly dramatised when the plantation is affected with foot and mouth disease not long after his containment of the cholera epidemic: once again I had to impose restrictions on all movements in my little kingdom, which involved many further troubles and fights amongst the natives and my watchmen(91). The creeper has come into his kingdom. The uneasy discourse of humanism detected earlier is abandoned forthwith and the transition is inaugurated with his acquisition of a plantation of his own. It results in his decision to leave the one that he has been working for since his arrival in Malaya. Ainsworth commences work on the new plantation, building his bungalow, installing a new rubber mill as well as a power plant, and becomes quite a successful planter in his own right (99). With the right of ownership, comes also the right of delegation. He hires a Chinese mechanic to run the plantation while he embarks on a new project, as he goes off on a prospecting expedition to survey a piece of Government land that he feels inclined to invest in (108). What ensues is the changeover from planter to what Mary Louis Pratt identifies as the seeing-man, a term she uses to refer to the European male subject of European landscape discourse- he whose imperial eyes passively look out and possess (1992: 7). As she explains further, such expeditions of accumulating the natural history of colonised lands were aimed at territorial surveillance, appropriation of resources, and administrative control (39). This is precisely the project that Ainsworth proceeds with. Starting out by merely wishing to survey the land for his own economic enterprise by engaging the help of a number of Malays, he moves on to join forces with another British man in a surveying business, which included detailed surveys of plantations and original prospecting surveys of virgin jungle for firms already holding areas of land in Malaya 150). The narration consequently shifts into the mode of a surveillance drama, where Ainsworth draws out the details of the Malayan landscape and its inhabitants. The discourse of the landscanning [colonialist] eye (Pratt: 1992) as it gazes out and possesses its visual and physical landscape would make an interesting analysis. However, I would argue too that discourses such as this do tend to overlook in turn the agency of the surveyed subject of narrativity. For in Ainsworths encounters with his Indian coolie force, he is anything but the selfpossessed landor more preciselybody-scanner. I suggest too that the surveillance episode is inserted into the narrative framework to legitimise his

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sovereignty in the scheme of things as this proves to be rather difficult inside the plantation3. The full force of such dissension is evident in the episode below. After a number of months on that surveillance operation, Ainsworth decides to return to the realm of the plantocracy and takes up a managing position at a plantation just outside of the town of Kuala Lumpur. There, he experiences one of the most violent coolie rebellions. The problem begins when he employs a former kangany from his previous plantation to aid in his new venture. As he explains, the Tamil conductor on the estate, who is the foreman over all the coolies and over the Kangany as well, for some reason or other took a violent dislike to this Kangany and continually went out of his way to make life as unbearable as possible for him (184). Ainsworth, having had his fill of this display of territorialism, decides to take the conductor to task and threatens, in his own words to push his face in for him (184). To his utter amazement, the man replied in a most insolent way, How can you do it . Not at all pleased at such insubordination, Ainsworth knocks him to the ground. What ensues is a very interesting display of the politics of the plantation world. The beaten man proceeds to run to the coolie lines moaning and screaming and as he ran he tore his shirt to ribbons and ruffled his hair into wild disorder, so as to give the coolies the impression that he had been terribly manhandled by me, to incite them to revolt (185). Yet, bear in mind that we only have Ainsworths version of what took place. Whether or not the kangany was terribly manhandled is not clear. In this way, the subaltern is effectively silenced and whatever reaction to colonial power is rendered inconsequential. However, on another level, Ainsworths description of the estate conductors dramatic actions serves to highlight the ways in which subaltern figures could garner enough agency to re-inscribe imperial order of events. Ainsworth anticipates success on the part of the conductor and decides to prepare himself for a possible battle. His account of the battle that does indeed take place demonstrates that the imperial delegation of authority to certain members of the labour force was in itself problematical. Though these individuals were employed to act as intermediaries between the planter and his coolies, they often became authoritative figures for the latter and thus deflected the reach of colonial control. This is clearly demonstrated in its entirety when soon after Ainsworth relates that the whole of the Indian labour force, consisting of some four hundred men and women carrying sticks, hoes and weapon of one kind or another [] were slowly advancing towards me, headed by the now hysterical and infuriated conductor [].(186). The coolie community was obviously more than capable of creating and enacting scenes of their own and thus capable too of circumventing the overall direction of colonial authoritative figures.

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However, imperial authority must struggle to maintain its status as the preservers of law and order. As Ainsworth has himself maintained from the very beginning, punishment was a right of rule to uphold order and is hence incensed at the very idea of this scum daring to resent my actions and my punishment of the conductor(186). His words emphasise his objectification of the coolies. It is a strategy that works to discursively obfuscate their inherent agency as cognitive beings. What follows is an intense battle between Ainsworth and his insurgent labourers, the former first driving straight at the angry mob in his car, so as to break the circle of rebellion (an act that registers the infamous imperial technique of divide and conquer). Thereafter he sets out to deliver a sound beating of his rebellious conductor, finally overpowering him. The crowd seems to disperse slightly, yet, he speaks of a remaining hundred or more labourers who started throwing stones and latex collecting cups at him from behind the rubber trees4. At this point, Ainsworth gets reinforcement from his assistant manager and together they manage to bring the situation under control. Yet the drama is far from over. When Ainsworth and his assistant march to the General Managers office to explain the situation, they find that the conductor had already made his way there ahead of them:
Lying in a long-chair, and covered with a sheet hoping to enlist the sympathies of the General Manager by telling him a long and lurid story of the way I had treated him. His story had lost nothing in the telling, and he had surpassed himself in flights of oratory and stretches of the imagination (189)

The passage, and the ensuing discussion, puts into play the politics of the issue of voice and the right (and privilege) of narration on various levels. Ainsworths depiction of the conductor already presents a prejudicial view, as he dismisses the latters plausibility in recounting the incident. The very incident that is referred to comes to us (the readers) through Ainsworths view. This is coloured by his discourse of race and imperial ideology. The conductor remains voiceless, his words transcribed to us and that too in dismissive terms. The fact that it is then reported that it was only when the General Manager heard Ainsworths account that he realized the gravity of the matter reinforces the weightage of colonial discourse that is irrevocably set on the side of the ruling party. This is duly rounded off by a special court of enquiry superseded by the Indian Immigration Officers as well as the Police:
at which all the coolies who had taken part in the revolt were made to attend. After the evidence on both sides had been heard, they were severely warned of the consequences if such a thing were ever to occur again, while the conductor himself was deported from the country. (189)

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Notably, the coolies are the ones who are taken to task. Their side of the story is dismissed in favour of the colonial master. It is a side we never hear in the narrative and it was obviously never really heard too in the court proceeding Ainsworth speaks of. The fact that the conductor is deported reiterates the curtailing of his voice, as was the fate of many amongst such insurgent figures of the coolie community. Thus here, not only does the weight of narrative authority fall on Ainsworths side, but more significantly, even [the myth of] authenticity lies on his side of the imperial divide, effectively leaving the insurgent conductor with neither voice nor truth on his. As Gareth Griffiths succinctly puts it, the possibilities of subaltern speech are contained by the discourse of the oppressor (1995: 238). The telling of the story is undoubtedly in the grasp of the narrator. It emphasises the immense powers invested in the realm of narrativity in the colonial era when the subaltern could not write himself into the pages of discursive history. However, there is also the equally powerful strategy invested in the act of reading such material in the postcolonial world. Subaltern speech may be contained by the discourse of the oppressor but subaltern discourse analysis can lay open the structures of discursive domination and the various myths of authenticity that it struggled to preserve. My reading of Ainsworths narrative has highlighted incidents of insubordination (or insurgency) as recurrent events in the colonial plantation world. It has shown how the sign of docility was always circumvented by insurgent coolies. When the narrative is read against the grain, an alternative story can be gathered. As such the fixed sign systems that have so encrusted the figure of the coolie can be consequently shifted by such alternative readings. Yet, the reins of narrative power still remain in Ainsworths hands and it does not end on the heels of his victorious court proceedings. Rather, having reestablished his right of rule in the plantation, he leaves to take up his position as manager of the estate in another Malay state, Kedah. As a finishing touch to his confessional, he brings to the forefront the image of the planter as saviour of his flock, the labour force. We are told of an old Indian conductors attempted suicide and the coolie communitys apparent dependence upon his ability to set the situation right:
I was aware of the Indian dresser from the estate hospital running towards the bungalow in a state of great excitement. With much puffing and panting he told me of the conductors suicide, and ended up with the request that would Master come out, please and see. What on earth he expected me to do about it, I dont know; but he had the usual coolies faith in the white mans ability to perform miracles. (207)

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The insertion of this incident acts as a final bid to buttress the colonial self that had taken quite a beating by the rather violent insurgency that he had experienced shortly before. Here, the obvious deference to his role as saviour saves in turn the fallen colonial self, especially as he does not seem to be very useful in treating the injured kangany. In fact, the dresser resumes his work once back at the conductors side and when he shows the extent of the damage to Ainsworth, the latter confesses: I made one dive for the verandah and fairly vomited my inside out(208). However, his presence there is described to be a guiding one, as he bids the dresser to temporarily stitch the patient up and orders a stretcher for the latter and drives him to the estate hospital. Significantly, intimations of the feature of humanism (or benevolence) that Ainsworth showed in the initial sections of his narration return to the fold. He is concerned that the heat of the afternoon sun may be too much for his injured subject and consequently arranges for a Chinese boy to borrow a large paper umbrella and made him sit on the cars folded hood, holding the sunshade over the conductors head (209). He mentions also that he was called as a witness to testify in the colonial governments prosecution, later, of this very conductor after he had recovered, for attempted suicide. This account reveals the extent to which coolies were seen primarily as property of the colonial government if their decisions to take their lives into their own hands (either figuratively or literally in the case of this conductor) were not sanctioned by rule of law. This is the last that we see of the coolie community in the narrative, as with the advent of the rubber slump, Ainsworth has no choice but to return to England. His concluding remarks to his narrative serves to consecrate his (self-acclaimed) position as accomplished master (and heroic figure) of the Malayan plantocracy:
One final word of advice to those contemplating a permanent life in Malaya. If they should be twenty-five years of age, if they should be of a nervous, highlystrung temperament, or if they imagine that a living can be picked up by going out on the chance of doing so, then they should at once abandon the idea. In each of these cases the result would be disastrous, and yet another tale of woe would be recorded against one of the most beautiful countries in the Tropics. (220)

The second narrative that I look at, Pahang by the American author Bush, is an encapsulation of the third case that Ainsworth cautions against. Bush sets sail to Malaya equipped only with his interest and intrigue in this land that he had read so much about. Furthermore, his decision to become a planter is germinated on the deck of the Dutch Steamer that he has boarded, a result of his conversation with a British passenger, whose description of the life of the Malayan planter has him captivated. Does his incursion into the realm of the Malayan plantation generate a tale of woe? Or does it become instead yet another discourse on the

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ways in which the Indian coolie was utilised as a body-scape within the pool of Manichean allegory to aid the development of the middle-class Western personas journey from nonentity to the heroic white saviour of the plantocracy?

The Frontiersman as Dorai : Willard C Bushs Pahang


Brown, black and yellow bodies. Rain drenched nights and the roar of a man-eating tiger. The steady, sinister, barbarous boom! boom! boom! of the drums and the hiss of a king cobra in the dark. One lone white man with a cane in his hand and a six-gun on his hip among thousands of natives. A rubber planter. (Willard C. Bush)

The above is how Willard C. Bush introduces his autobiographical narrative, Pahang. It is undoubtedly a highly romanticised depiction of the rubber planter in the Malay States as it draws him up to be the hero of his tale, isolated amidst a savagely sinister setting. Was this what the Malayan plantation was or was it the embellishment of the white man using the myth of the hero to secure a sense of superiority for the self? The preface reinforces what the subtitle to the narrative already sets down for the reader by designating it as a saga, which the OED defines as a story of heroic achievement or marvellous adventure. Added to this is the fact that the stand of the narrator is deeply reminiscent of that of the pioneer of American frontier literature (the writer is after all an American). The following is the description of the figure of the American pioneers or frontiersmen by Frederick Jackson Turner:
The wilderness masters the colonist. It finds him a European in dress, industries, tools, modes of travel, and thought. It takes him from the railroad car and puts him in the birch canoe. It strips off the garments of civilization and arrays him in the hunting shirt and the moccasin. It puts him in the log cabin of the Cherokee and Iroquois and runs an Indian palisade around him. Before long he has gone to planting Indian corn and plowing with a sharp stick, he shouts the war cry and takes the scalp in orthodox Indian fashion. (1921: chap. one)

Consider first the depiction of the pioneer American as colonist, followed by the image of him stripped of the garb of civilisation and shouting the war cry, joining the native American community, brandishing the stick. Next, compare this with the image of the planter that Bush draws in his preface. There are similarities in both portraits, and this is an obvious demonstration of the (familiar) idea of the frontiersman that Bush brings with him and transplants into the Malayan landscape. Turner proceeds to argue that though the rifle and

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the axe are the symbols of the backwoods pioneer a training in aggressive courage, in domination, in directness of action, in destructiveness this backwoodsman was more than a mere destroyer. He had visions. He was finder as well as fighter--the trail-maker for civilization, the inventor of new ways (1921: chap. 10). Witness the similar justification of colonisation that British imperialists adopted. Furthermore, Turner establishes too in due course that the stand of the imperial English pioneer was similar to that of the American frontiersman: Although Rudyard Kipling's "Foreloper" deals with the English pioneer in lands beneath the Southern Cross, yet the poem portrays American traits as well, proceeding with citations of a few key lines from the poem (chap. 10). His argument is a key factor in establishing the parallel between American frontier discourse and British imperial discourse. The following discussion of his text will show how notions of imperial/frontier ideology are sustainably maintained in his narration and how the Indian coolie community resisted its boundary markers, in much the same manner as Ainsworths encounter. Yet, it will also show that because he was not directly involved with the colonial forces present in Malaya, his collusive stand is somewhat distanced. As such his observations about the nature of the coolie system openly reveal the more damagingly negative features of imperialism than Ainsworth. For instance, Bushs description of the coolie community uses terminology that is reminiscent of nineteenth and early twentieth century American descriptions of plantation slaves, demonstrating the slave foundations of the indenture system. This was also Ainsworths observation, only he did not expand upon it, as it would have contradicted his countrys imperial legitimacy. The introductory chapter, like Ainsworths, is one that describes his journey to Malaya on board a (Dutch) steamer. This is where he learns of the life of the planter in the east. Bush is captivated by its details, in spite of the fact that it is depicted as a white mans grave, teeming with snakes, man eating tigers, fevers and complete isolation(4). Perhaps this is because it is reminiscent of the frontier life of the American West. An interesting incident takes place on board the steamer that in a sense introduces the discourse and nomenclature of slavery as well as his role as the white hero that will later permeate his narrative. He witnesses and is consequently angered by the rather brutal treatment of a young Chinese slave girl by her merchant (Chinese) master (7). When he sees the same little girl curled up on the floor of the dining salon, moaning as her body lurched with the rolling movement of the ship, he decides to move her to a more comfortable position on the other side of the room. However, the ships lurching movements awaken the little girl as Bush scoops her into his arms. Chaos follows, for finding herself in the arms of a foreigner, she screamed with fright, a long loud scream. Bush confesses to feeling very silly now and wishing

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heartily that I had not essayed the role of the Good Samaritan (8-9). He has failed miserably at his very first attempt to play the role of the white saviour. Will this stance of the benevolent white male figure that Bush so readily adopts be enforced in his treatment of the coolie community that he will preside over? They were, after all, to all intents and purposes, slave labour of the plantation system. Will he espouse the very condemnation of the senseless beating of this little slave girl in his dealings with his labour force and would it thus deter him from meting out similar brutal punishments? I will let the following discussion answer these crucial questions. In the process I will also show that, like the little girl, the coolies disrupt the role of the white saviour (and master) by clamorous acts of their own. Bushs description of Bukit Batu, the plantation that he is assigned to, as my bailiwick (16), which the OED defines as a sherifdom or district under the jurisdiction of a bailiff reveals him already establishing himself as law enforcer or progressive policeman of the plantocracy. Furthermore, the frontier outlook is exhibited in his depiction of the plantation as having one thousand acres of rubber trees spread over rolling country and surrounded by a high wall of one of the most impenetrable and deadly jungles in the world (17). This description reflects the ideology of what Turner terms as the the outer edge of the wave-- the meeting point between savagery and civilization (chap. 1). Consequently, it underscores the issue of boundaries that rule plantation life and the regulated life, duly symbolised by the orderly array of the rubber trees as opposed to the indiscernible labyrinth that is the Malayan rainforest. This notion of boundary markers and their subsequent defence system is drawn further in Bushs first meeting with Royce, the outgoing plantation manager or overseer. Royces bungalow, strategically situated on a knoll with the coolie lines two hundred yards down the slope (17), symbolically reflects the role of the manager as presiding monarch of his plantation kingdom. It also calls to mind Pratts idea of the colonial seeing man. Royces advice to Bush reiterates the need for distinct demarcations of boundary lines and the defence system that must be adhered to at all times:
You must bear in mind the fact that you will be here all alone and must constantly guard against accidents to yourself. There are enough natural hazards around you day and night without deliberately placing yourself in the path of new and greater ones dont lose your head and dont look for trouble. Plenty of that will come without any seeking. (28)

His words are reminiscent of the scene in Conrads The Heart of Darkness, where Marlow is advised to keep calm above all else in the tropics. They reiterate the warning that the white man was always to keep his back guarded in the dangerous tropics and that he was to maintain his composure at all times by

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strict adherence to the imperial formula of control. Royce proceeds with a tabulation of his modus operandi, consisting of various methods for the prevention of malaria, rules of conduct, handling labour forces, methods of work, routine, and accounting (28). The following day, Bush is given his tour of the plantation and it is here that we are first introduced to the Tamil labourers:
A vile smell of unwashed bodies and filthy garments together with the odor of stale coconut oil with which the Tamils smeared their bodies every week nauseated me. They were all swathed from head to foot in clothes. All I could see of them was their black shiny feet and ankles and pairs of beady black eyes glittering at me in the dim light of the fires. Here and there the bright blade of a knife glowed dully from the folds of a garment. I walked closer to Royce. The place seemed evil. (30)

The passage is steeped in Manichean allegory, placing the labourers well and truly at the negative end of its pole. Yet, ironically, this very description, while thoroughly derogatory in form, offers one of the few detailed views we have of coolie life. On one level the imagery is used by the writer to accentuate the repugnant condition of these subjects that he will subsequently rule over. Yet, on another level, it shows the reader the abject poverty and dismal working conditions of these people. His sensory perception offers an important passageway into our seeing and sensing the coolies as more than just tools of the rubber enterprise. There is also the sinister undercurrent in the writers attentiveness to the flashes of the tapping knives that the coolies hold. Firstly, its presence hints at the colonial tension of anticipative threats of violent insurgency on the part of the coolies. This notably then would serve to justify the role of bailiff alluded to earlier. Secondly, it operates also as an admission to possible agency on the part of the coolies if they are seen as capable of perhaps subverting the purpose of the tapping knives and turning it against their colonial master. Terms of classification were recognizably susceptible to coolie intervention. Bushs consequent advancement into the world of the colonial rubber plantation is accompanied by incidents that put into play such interferences with the general operation of the plantation system. One important arena where colonial control finds it difficult to attain a concrete grasp is, as we now know, that of religion and culture. Bush is initiated into this Other realm of the Indian coolie community when a cobra causes the death of an Indian woman (45). However, when the coolies have the said reptile within their sight, he finds that, instead of killing it, they demonstrate what he can only perceive as a savage adulation of the creature. They beg him not to kill it and it is at that moment

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that he remembers Royces advice never to interfere with the rites and customs of the natives (46) and gives in to their appeal. This is taken a few steps further when the plantation is beset by a bout of dysentery. Bush is alerted (by his Sikh watchman, Mardu Singh) that
The Tamils had been drawn to a small Hindu temple near the edge of the village of Simpan Tiga to worship a king cobra their object was apparently to break the spell of dysentery and malaria which had broken out on [Plantation] Number Two When dysentery gets into the coolie lines it works frightful havoc among the natives, as sanitation among them is very difficult, if not impossible, to enforce. (60)

Their action not only contravenes rules of the plantation as they leave their work site. It also exhibits their confidence in the healing power of the deities from within their own culture over that of their white master. Furthermore, colonial control is also notably unable to hold its ground over certain matters, like sanitation. For while on the one hand Bushs remark about the coolies unhygienic behaviour is meant to accentuate the height of their savagery, on the other hand it points to a failure on his part to enforce their adherence to plantation rules and regulations. It stands as a demonstration of one of the many ways in which the hold of colonial control was disrupted by its own subjects. However, the narrator as hero of his own story must retrieve his staff of king, judge and doctor, that role that epitomises the core of his identity as planter (and colonial master). Bushs immediate remark upon entering the vicinity of the affected plantation is that the head man of the gangs and the field conductors all appeared to be glad of my arrival (71). These are of course the very men who have been appointed as the planters henchmen, members from within the subaltern community who collude with colonial power to ensure its staying hand. Failing to assert their power over the coolies, they look to the colonial master to set things right, a task which Bush immediately takes up to regain the measure of control lost to the presiding religious deity. While the role of the benevolently protective planter is adopted, his description of the effects of the epidemic on the coolies reveals the underside of the plantation experience. Here the coolies are not submerged by the detached tone of the statistical death documentation seen in official records. Instead, their vulnerability to various health hazards becomes increasingly evident. Take for instance the following scene:
a small group of Hindus approached. A woman crawled on the ground, crying and drawing herself towards me on her stomach. She drew herself to my feet, laying her forehead on my boots, sobbing too hard to tell me what her trouble was. Her husband informed me that their baby had died that day, the second child of theirs to die in the past ten days. (72)

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While the image of the woman touching his feet is symbolic of her veneration for him (the traditional ritual of falling at the feet of ones protector) and thus emphasising his role as hero, the details of her pain and the way in which it is portrayed offer an insight into the world of the coolie as individuals caught in the capitalist trap. This is further affirmed when Bush recounts: I now realised more than ever before that although they were not much more than grown-up children possessing the savagery of unenlightened children their troubles and heartaches were probably as poignant and hard to bear as are those of the white race (71). While he emphasises their Otherness at every point, the admission of the impoverished condition of the coolies is in itself a testimony of the corrosive feature of the plantation world. This is subsequently employed to further empower his role as hero of that very world by striving to set things right. Bush promptly arranges for the hospitalisation of the ailing woman. Yet, she too dies and was buried the next day in the usual shallow graves where she would become food for the hogs when they found her (73). The starkness of the imagery palpably expresses the all too familiar savage face of the colonialist plantocracy. In this way, though the subaltern is inserted into the framework to strengthen Bushs aura as the white saviour of the native, the discourse inadvertently reveals the malevolent features of the very imperial force that he serves. There is also a two-pronged reflection of Pratts idea of the reciprocal vision of natives in the colonial writing. The subaltern may be inserted by the authors need to see himself reflected in the eyes of the Other, yet, in the process she reflects a vision that is not very flattering of what is claimed to be the ever benevolent face of imperialism. It is this troubling self-image that induces Bush to turn quickly to the task of luring the absconded coolies away from the temple and back to the centre of his domain. His strategy is to administer extra rationing of food to chase away the spirit of gloom (88) that hangs over their lines and to get the plantation to function properly again. Things do return to normal as he remarks triumphantly a few pages later most of the runaways had returned ... This was my kaboon [plantation] and I was getting the feeling that I could meet things as they came and make a real rubber estate of what had been given me My Kaboon! I had become a pukka jungle wallah(90). However, this narrative creation and consequent development of the heroic stature of the Western planter as the main persona of the text comes appended with subtexts that expose the victimisation of subaltern lives by the very system that aids his empowerment. By portraying them not only in the predetermined role of biddable tools for the furtherance of the imperial rubber trade but in a variety of other contexts, the seemingly fixed sign system of subalternity is

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dislodged, revealing its inherent heterogeneity. In the process, agency is revealed as well:
Strange, I thought, how angry these devils could make me at times; how exasperating they could beand how dangerous Adults with the mentality and ruthless cruelty of childrena murderous disregard for consequences when arousedand the ability to look you straight in the eye with all the innocence in the world shining in their faces, lying their very hearts out. (93)

Bush may place the coolies well within the negative end of the Manichean pole of allegory by strategically infantilising them. However, what is dismissed as childish obstinacy reveals the subtext of agency on the part of the seemingly infantile colonial subject. This reflects what Douglas Haynes and Gyan Prakash identify as everyday resistance, a concept derived from South East Asianist theorist, James Scott. It refers to a strategy commonly used by peasant groups in South Asia in demonstrations of opposition to oppressive situations through an assortment of acts of avoidance. These include absconding from plantations [as established above] as well as smaller, everyday actions, such as foot-dragging, [or] sitting outside an enemys door until he relents in his behaviour (1991: 5). Such resistance is exhibited in Bushs allusion to the coolies capacity for violence when they saw fit. Additionally, if they really did look him straight in the eye as he asserts, then it effectively displaces the oft repeated feature of submissiveness that is linked to figure of the Indian coolie. Admittedly, such actions or reactions are not the overt rebellions against the dominating powers as seen in Ainsworths narrative before this. However, they do succeed in dislodging the sign system of transfixed subalternity that has held the figure of the coolie in historical custody. True to form however, Bush strategically sweeps aside such evidences of resistance to his imperial power by reinforcing his status as master of his domain. His strategy is to arrange for the coolies to have a night of fiesta to drive away the vestiges of the misery and tragedy of the past few weeks. Through this, he can regain he can reinstate his benevolent visage. Yet at the same time, he is careful to stay away from the festivities himself. : there still remained the unwritten law that the master must retain the respect of his underlings by living a life apart. Loss of respect is quickly followed by loss of obedience to authority. And the old rule about familiarity was never so true as here(94-95). It confirms that insubordination was always a problem for the planter as coolies crossed the boundary lines if they were not held back substantially. The edges of his garb of ruler and master had to be protected from slipping into the Other side of the Manichean divide.

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The culmination of his stature as protector of his flock is seen when he kills a tiger that had been terrorising the labour lines. In his triumphant return:
The tuan besar was escorted with a torch parade and the throbbing of many drumsthe tom-toms stirred my senses to a point of savage affinity with the half-wild people around me there in the deep jungle, walled in by the black shroud of the starless tropical night. Any other kind of existence seemed, for the moment, unreal. I had been here all my life and would be here in these barbarous surroundings till the end of time. The Raj. (112)

Though his words set the coolie community well on the savage side of the racial and civilizational gulf, it reveals too the heady influence of the negative end of the Manichean pole. We see the possibility of him following in the footsteps of Conrads Kurtz. Minutes from his transgression of the divide however, he says: the spell I had been under was violently broken by the sight of a loathsome eight-inch centipede as large as my thumb, that had apparently dropped from the tables edge to my bare flesh. I sprang up and away from it and killed it with my cane (114). The act metaphorically kills the urge to succumb to temptation. The Manichean edgings are thus left securely intact. It is befitting that once he experiences the full fledged feature of his heroic stature, his time there in the plantation comes full circle and he moves on to put other plantations in order(115). However order was never a clear and simple affair. The passage below succinctly demonstrates that the coolies had ample agency to actually drive Bush out on short trips to collect his nerves every now and again, even though it stands primarily as his invective against their numerous inadequacies:
Such diversion was absolutely, taking my mind of subjects dangerous for a lonely white man to dwell upon, the dealing with such exasperating problems as the mind of the mind of the coolie with all its myriad, incomprehensible angles, native convictions and taboos [] and their complete indifference towards anything one might do to improve their lot. (155)

In the second plantation that hes assigned to, he speaks of arguments among the workers as field conductors loudly accused Sithumperum, Moottatandi, or Cheemo of various offences, such as putting water in the latex in order to fill the bucket and fool the company (156). Arguably my pointing these issues out as resistant features of cooliesm may be taken to be a reflection of my affirming, rather than dismantling the various stereotypes of the coolie (as savage, deceitful, untrustworthy, despondent etc.) invested in such colonialist descriptions. However, I argue that these traits are signs of the imperialists failure to transfix the coolie into submissiveness. They are the everyday forms

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of resistance whereby the subaltern is able to wear down the grip of his dominator. There is a rather interesting variant of such modes of resistance in the figure of an Indian mimic man that Bush encounters in his third plantation: I beheld a little spindling Hindu in khaki trousers and tunic, bearing a lantern
held high up near his face, advancing toward me. There was excitement but a lot of courage in the large dark eyes that looked at me from above a handlebar mustache. I am Singhlryahn. Field conductor on this estate, sah, he said. Bless my hell I speak good Englis. I hear Godam noise. You are not ill, I fear? (209)

There is a sense of self-assertion in the coolies act of holding the light up to his face. There is no evidence of subservience in his mannerism, as Bush can only see courage reflected in his eyes. The scene reflects what Homi Bhabha has argued in reference to colonial mimicry, where the reforming civilising mission [of colonialism] is threatened by the displacing gaze of its disciplinary double (1994: 86). Here the Tamil conductor displaces the gaze as he reflects a (farcical) double of the colonial onlooker. Added to that is also the fact that he has displaced the linguistic mould within which he should be securely fixed, that of the Tamil language. Symbolically his name is an ill-defined hybrid of East and West. While most coolies are never given voice in colonial texts and are mostly depicted through their actions (whether farcical or violent) Singhlryahn speaks in this text. Naturally though, his speech is a transcription that strategically belies his very assertion of being able to speak good Englis, the aborted h strategically disproving the subalterns mastery of his masters language. However, in that very appropriation of the language of the coloniser there is yet another fine thread of resistance. The mimic defies the set identity of the Tamil coolie in the eyes of the colonial master. In my discussion heretofore, I have essentially developed the idea that the colonialists intent in mapping out signposts of his authority is constantly seen to be disabled at the far margins by subalterns who haul them out of the frame, whether actively or otherwise and assemble imprints of their own. I have shown also that because Bush is not wholly involved in the imperial enterprise (hes not British or of any of the other imperial nations that had their stake in Malaya), his narrative reveals more readily the harsher (and more savage) features of the rubber trade and its treatment of the coolie community. To end, I cite a significant excerpt which effectively epitomises the misanthropic feature of the administration that he worked for, which serves also as an apt introduction to the final section of this chapter. In a heated exchange with a company official who queries the exceptionally high death rate in one of his plantations Bush retorts You have challenged every order for medical supplies that I sent in and allowed me to be short of everything. And now you are

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shocked to learn of the death of four-hundred and forty-seven coolies to which the former replies You know we have to watch expenditures and keep the overhead as low as possible [...] The Dutch rubber companies have been giving us fits for the last couple of years only to receive in return Bushs explosive rejoinder: Letem die. Ill skin em and sell their hides to a tannery. Youve made money out of the hearts of the blighters. Ill make mine out of their pelts! (185). It lays bare the rapacious features of colonialism and its fundamental economic basis that undercuts all notion of perceived benevolence. It hints also at the competition that was rampant between rival colonial forces, namely the British, the Dutch and the French, present in the country as each raced to outdo the other. It is thus befitting that we move on to Sacrilege in Malaya by French planter Pierre Boulle, where such competition is articulated with allegorical finesse. The novel also demonstrates the changing feature of the plantation system, where, as Henri Fauconnier, a renowned planter of colonial Malaya once put it, to be a simple planter is no longer enough, it is now necessary to be an administrator, an accountant and a scientist (1931: ix). In the pages of Boulles novel, we see how the world that Ainsworth and Bush encountered transgresses into one where profit margins and newer and more mechanical methods of rubber tapping become the order of the day. In the process, the coolies too seem to be more progressively active in transmuting the boundary markers of subalternity. We must thus leave Bush as he himself leaves the plantation scene to return to America for a holiday, the years in the Malayan plantations having turned him into what he would probably proudly assert as a pukka English dorai. The closing scene on the decks of the steamer that he boards for his trip home acts as its testimony, for a fellow passenger remarks: I took you for an Englishman. Accent. Clothes. All that sort of thing (283). The American frontiersman has succeeded in becoming a dorai of the East. It is now the Frenchmans turn to display the politics of domination and subordination on the rapidly changing stage of the European plantocracy.

Reclaiming space on a transforming plantocratic chequerboard: Pierre Boulles Sacrilege in Malaya


Shridath Ramphal once referred to the Indian peasants who were transported to work on the various colonial plantations in the nineteenth century as mute pieces on the chequerboard of worldwide colonialism (1988: 63). In my argument thus far, the Indian coolies of Malaya have proved to be anything but mere figurines passively moved about by their imperial master. Admittedly Ramphals allusion to their condition of muteness is relevant if only because their speech was most times suppressed by the dominant voice of their masters.

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Even so, this did not necessarily mean they were led about in total silence. In fact, we have seen numerous examples of how vocal they could be. I do however wish to retain Ramphals metaphor of the chequerboard in my reading of Boulles Sacrilege in Malaya. The novel demonstrates the full extent to which the coolies could cross the boundary lines of the imperial chequerboard of control. As much as the plantocracy tried their level best to move the labourers according to their own scheme of things, they persistently made their way across the squares and thus claimed more space than they were allocated. These were neither noiseless nor reticent performances that could be effectively kept in check and in many ways they play a much larger role than the coolies in the narratives of Ainsworth and Bush. The novel opens with the image of a French financier and his cobbler, the former entertaining visions of an enterprise in rubber in British Malaya:
You sing, therefore you act. I am and I think. Ive tried to stop you acting and singing. Ive been wrong, From now on were going to act together. You sing, therefore you act; you can work in wood just as well as leather. We shall extract latex from the trees of the equatorial forests. I shall move you there. You will tap the rubber trees. I shall give you the necessary tools. I shall plant more trees. I shall build you a house. I shall sell the rubber. All you need do is sing and tap the trees. (4)

His words depict a confidence of deftly controlling every movement of his labour force, manoeuvring each and every one of them on the chequerboard that he has devised. He appears to think that there will be no problems in ensuring that the coolie would keep squarely within the boundaries that he determines. Yet, the dynamics of the plantation world are not as easily contained as he imagines it to be. The Indian labourer demonstrates remarkable agility in intermittently disrupting the manoeuvres of the colonial hand that is intent on working out and maintaining the boundaries of exclusion and inclusion within the coveted colonial space. The narrative focus, I will show, is predominantly on the politics of space in the plantation. The text proceeds with the arrival of Maille, newly recruited as assistant manager to one of the plantations in Malaya owned by the financiers company, the Society for the Overseas Promotion of Horticulture industry and Agriculture or SOPHIA as it is commonly referred too. We then follow his subsequent inclusion into the well guarded colonial stronghold of the plantation world and its unmistakable fixation on establishing boundaries between the Europeans and the Asians. Maille is first taken to the Agency, which oversees all the plantations that belong to the company. It is there that we encounter the preoccupation with space and the differing rhythms of inclusions and exclusions that it produces. Maille notes that the office of the Managing Director, Chaullete

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was approached by a vast empty space(14). The private office of Reynaud, the Company Secretary is cordoned off by a wicket gate and a glass partition separated him from the mainly Asian clerical staff. It was designed to enable him to keep an eye on their every movement (14). The Chief Clerk, an Asiatic is allowed to have a desk that is a shade longer than the ones used by the other Asian staff as he was the only member of the Asiatic personnel who spoke French (17). Chaullete is adamant that the Secretariat reflects perfect alignment in terms of space, and engages everyone in a spot of rearranging the furniture. In the end, he decides that another window ought to be put in to achieve the balance needed. This he asserts would also give Reynaud more space (19). These demarcations set the scene for the spectacle that is to follow as the particularities of the role that is accorded to the Indian coolie within the compound of the plantation is delineated to its last intricate detail. When Maille first meets Loeken, the manager of Kebun Kossong, the rubber plantation that he is assigned to, the latter establishes the golden rules. They are as follows: there was to be [n]o familiarity with an Asiatic, whoever he may be; one was [n]ever, in any circumstance, [to] shake hands with them; it was unthinkable to ever permit an Asiatic to remain seated in your presence without your permission; and lastly, and stressed rather strongly, interfering with the female labour force was absolutely forbidden (22). These rules emphasise the workings of the exclusive space that they are to inhabit as members of the ruling race. They were to remind the planter that the Asiatic was never to trespass within its compound. Such is the intended framing of the planter-coolie relationship. Yet, every so often the coolies would dash in and out of its edges. Maille is first introduced to the coolies by way of the person who is in charge of waking his fellow workmen for roll-call or muster:
The Tamil in charge for waking the workmen was not content with blowing his trumpet only in the morning. Proud of his duty, and conscientious at that, he also blew several resounding blasts in the course of the night to show that he was really there. (31)

The labourer has obviously exceeded the set requirements of his task. Yet by this precise conduct of excess, he not only disrupts the nocturnal peace of the whole plantation, but also, more importantly, it is an action that allows him to be heard. Thus not only does his sounding of the horn infiltrate the atmosphere, but it also serves to include him for a brief moment into the colonial space even as he disrupts it. It demonstrates in part that the space into which the coolie is checked by the colonial administrator is not impermeable. These are the interstitial acts that alter his position on the plantocratic chequerboard.

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Benita Parry has argued that often the problem with colonial discourse analysis is the lack of
an engagement with the manifold and conflicting textual inscriptions the discontinuities, defensive rhetorical strategies and unorthodox language challenging official thought, the disruptions of structural unity effected by divergent and discordant voices- as the location and source of the texts politics. (2000: 737)

Part of the politics of Boulles text and concurrently that of the colonial plantation world is the very disruption of the voices or actions of the plantation labourer. Take the following scene at muster, which calls to mind a similar scene from Ainsworths narrative. Maille and the other assistant managers assume their places to record the presence of every labourer and to furnish them with the days tasks. However, we learn that certain labourers have their own way of recording their presence for the day. Some were grousers, whose tone betrayed the grudge they felt at being torn from their slumbers and others humorists, who pretended not to have heard their name called out, for the innocent pleasure of having it repeated (34). From the womens section of the workforce gathered on the field, there would come an occasional stifled giggle (34). Dassier, one among the three assistant managers there, attempts to gain control of the situation as he walks between the ranks of the gathered labourers. Yet, the discordant voices of the labourers work to interrupt this very effort. What is evident here is the image of the subaltern filtering through the narrative as they are recorded as disrupting the exercise of control. At such points they appear as performers, not merely passive subjects of empire. Such comic displays by these recalcitrant coolies call to mind Bakhtins notion of the comic chronotope of the public square and the theatrical spectacle of its farcical figures, namely the rogue, the clown and the fool. For as he puts it,
these figures are laughed at by others, and by themselves, as well. Their laughter bears the stamp of the public square where the folk gather. They re-establish the public nature of the human figure (1981: 159-160)

The muster becomes the public square where the coolie community congregates every morning. Ultimately, its original function of facilitating the smooth functioning of colonial order is disrupted by the comical figures who create their own little subplots within that space. By doing so, they establish a more noticeable sighting of themselves within a space meant only to record their presence, not their personalities. Thus, while the narrator emphasises their actions as emptily farcical in nature, it inadvertently reveals the coolies ability

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to unsettle pre-ordered colonial space and roles with routines of their own. These acts testify that the design of control was not totally boxed in within the clasp of their subjugators of the colonial class. As the narrative unfolds, it becomes more and more apparent that the planter community cannot calmly sit back and move the coolies on their capitalist chequerboard. Though treated and designated as production units, they prove to be somewhat resistant to the hand that hovers persistently over them. The coolies individuality may be effaced by the planters preoccupation with the larger working gangs into which they are assembled, yet often what is overlooked is the fact that such groups develop their own set of dynamics. Planters often forget that the individuals who make up that gang have their own traits and often resistance comes in its covert everyday form. Boulles narrative resonates with such dissonant events, the comic display at muster being only one amongst many. Take the discourse in the following passage for instance:
on certain occasions, and for a given length of time, the gang was capable of superhuman effort if they happened to like the man who was leading them. [] Such a display of energy on the part of the Tamils never lasted very long, and the average output of the gang was rather on the low side. (88)

What it reveals is that there appeared to be a certain degree of choice that lay in the lap of the coolie community and that they did indeed opt to exercise it in their own ways. Colonial authority, it seems, had to be earned. Likewise, at another point in the narrative, the appearance of a python on the scene proves yet again that the spread of the curve of profit was never fully within the control of the planter. A whole days work of tapping is disrupted by the presence of the predator, as all the tappers in the estate gather to help their fellow worker, Ramasamy, to capture it. The Director of the plantation is described as having had to close his eyes to the abrupt decline in the days crop (note the expression of exasperation at having no control over this incident). Once again the labourers dislodge the hand he has over the running of the estate. However, in the official plantation record, the actual reason is not registered, as he subsequently attributed this to a violent early-morning storm (41). With this, the labourers affirmative action of destroying a predator is successfully rendered invisible. This invisibility however is only in the official report for even as he erases it, the record of its erasure (and the incident it erases) already exists in the pages of the narrative that we read. It reveals the multi-layered reality of the plantation experience and consequently how the body of the coolie was constantly sifted through its discursive mesh. The silenced narrative speaks in this space while it is muted in the clasp of another.

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This is why colonial narratives such as the ones discussed in this chapter are important in the piecing together of the story of the Indian immigrant experience. Colonial official records seldom contain the anecdotal details necessary for a more enabled vision of the alterity marked upon the composure of colonial control. When compared with such texts, it becomes apparent that official reports were more guarded of the plantation experience as it struggled to preserve a facade of absolute sovereignty. Sacrilege in Malaya oscillates between this struggle of visualising colonial supremacy and ensuring its visibility at all times. This display of upholding absolute sovereignty over the subjects of the plantation regime is seen in full force at the planters club. There they talked of their tapping, their weeding, their trees, their coolies, their termites (78). Notice how the coolies are nondescriptly deposited in that line. It reiterates their status as nothing more than production units in the planters world. However, at the periphery of the conversation, seeps in the story of a newcomer who after only a fortnight of service, had felt he was entitled to strike a coolie and who had consequently received such a drubbing from all the indignant Tamils that he had to go to hospital a few days before taking the next ship home(81). The production units prove to possess their own sense and system of justice. Evidently too, sovereignty was not, by design, an uncontested right of the planter. It was something that had to be worked at in unison with the very community that he rules over. Such incidents of agitation demonstrate the varying syllables of tension that spring from the dynamics of the planter-coolie relationship. The narrative flow is constantly and vigilantly manoeuvred towards its central focus, the economic feature of the plantation encounter. It persistently draws out the details of maintaining cost-effective productivity. For instance, the companys intent of achieving such favourable profit margins results in the engineering of a wild rush from tree to tree (45) to be performed by every tapper, designed to ensure that periods of unproductivity were kept to a bare minimum. This resolute framing of this desired outcome is however subjected to an interesting reconfiguration by the labourers. The coolies, it is shown, see fit to create a system of response of their own as they vary the speed of that wild rush in order of the hierarchy of the plantocracy:
The assistant in charge of the division was entitled to a good brisk canter. For the benefit of the director of the plantation, Ramasamy worked this up once a week into a full gallop. And on the rare occasions when Mr. Chaulettes presence was signalled by the local bush telegraph, Ramasamy girded up his loins and launched into a wild charge which filled the Managing Director with joy. He kept this up until the noise of their motor-cars announced that his masters were finished with him. Then, alone in the depths of the artificial forest, he

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Chapter Two compensated himself for this expenditure of energy with a rest commensurate to the effort entailed. (45)

While on the one hand the passage resounds with animal imagery in its description of the labourer and seems to be drawn to accentuate his capricious nature in farcical terms, on the other hand there exists an undercurrent of agency. Note that it simultaneously demonstrates the interpretation and concurrent variation of Ramasamys execution of the plantation regulation according to his own terms. Thus while narrative irony is employed to ridicule the coolie, it inadvertently points to the ability of the coolie to transform colonial order. Ramasamys transformation of his masters formula is one indication of his collaboration with dominance. This collaboration is only displayed, as the passage itself intimates, when his superiors are present. As soon as they leave, he shrugs off the garb of compliance and takes a reprieve from the structured role that is placed upon him. In this way, while the passage itself highlights the errant doings of the coolie, it simultaneously points to its shaping of a discrete pattern of resistance. Such permutations of imperial order seem only to gather more force as the narrative progresses. Ironically, this is in spite of the arrival of Mr Bedoux, a specialist in labour organisation, with the task of rationalising the tapping of hevea bresiliensis, analysing the movements of Ramasamy the Tamil tapper, and co-ordinating these into a stylised and economic pattern (112). However Bedoux finds that it is impossible to keep his subjects of research in neat categories. His main concern is that he is able to maximise the period of the productivity of the whole tapping process. The art of coercion is a significant ingredient in the formula Bedoux derives. One of his contentions to Stout, the assistant manager whom he follows on the latters rounds of the plantation, is that too much reprimanding of the labourers worked only to impede the topmost objective of maximum profit. This is said in response to Stouts forceful reproach of a labourer who appeared to be showing great reluctance at his task. Bedoux reasons, Youve got to explain things carefully and make them understand that youre not trying to exploit them but on the contrary, youre out to help them (116). Stout however, intent on establishing his sovereignty as a member of the ruling race takes no notice and continues to reprimand the labourers for any and every evidence of insubordination. In one of these situations, he startles a coolie into spilling a whole cup of latex (117). With this he becomes responsible for adding a notch to the yardstick of unproductivity for the day. Capitalist production was thus obviously to co-exist with artful coercions of the coolie. Without this, the design of profit was notably incomplete. Consequently, it produced a tussle between safeguarding the domain of supremacy while simultaneously encouraging labour productivity. In order for this formula to succeed, they had to concentrate

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on fulfilling the needs of the subordinate labour force. Its resultant effects however were rather trying on the nerves of the imperial masters. Take, for instance, the issue of shoes for the labourer:
Uncle Law, who was anxious to have his labourers feet in good condition, said he should. S.T. Moss, however said he shouldnt and maintained that the wearing of shoes for a man in Ramasamys position was an inexcusable sign of emancipation which amounted to sheer defiance. (120-121)

The Agency however, authorises shoes for the labourers. Interestingly enough, Boulle writes that the moment the shoes were no longer forbidden, Ramasamy scorned to wear them, much to the annoyance of Uncle Law (121). There are several conflicting issues in this whole episode. As much as planters like Moss were intent on demarcating the boundaries between (civilised) self and (uncivilised) Other, because they were working for what was primarily a capitalist venture, they had to accede to the golden creed of high profit margins. This often meant that the coolie gained more status than he was supposed to. Added to this is the fact that the coolies were never passive in their responses to plantocratic regulations. At times they were agreeable, at others they were not. When all these come into play in the larger circle of the plantation world, friction was undoubtedly its resultant effect. The narrative constantly demonstrates that standing sentry at the boundaries of the planter-coolie divide is not a smooth task. Bedoux finds that for all his strategic manoeuvring, the formula of coercion that he so jealously guards is ultimately defeated by Ramasamys singular reluctance to allow himself to be rationalized(143). Faced with the crumbling edges of his prized project, Bedoux loses all control. He strikes Ramasamy in a fit of anger and exasperation, on the verge of hysteria(143) and finally bursts into tears. Tears of rage. Ramasamy had quietly reduced him to a state bordering on madness(161). While the failure of the imperial project is attributed to the inability on the part of the coolie to allow himself to be rationalised, it reveals in the process that the execution of colonial power was obviously on the collaboration of the colonised. In the end, Bedoux is forced to make a compromise: Ramasamy went through the same movement as before, only now he carried out his task in a series of fits and starts that gave the illusion of speed (191). Soon after, we learn of the Japanese invasion of Malaya. This event was rather cataclysmic for the coolies witnessed for the first time, their masters being held up to ridicule. Their army was being hacked to pieces by fellow Asiatics(243). Control was forcibly driven out of the grip of the Western imperial forces as their space was overtaken by a stronger Asian opponent. With this, the tiny spaces that were thus far claimed intermittently by the plantation labourers

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gather momentum. They became much bolder in their transgression of the boundaries of control. The European planters were forced to flee the country and they left the Asiatic personnel in charge for the first time. Uncle Laws parting words to them are I would advise you gentlemen to act on every occasion as your conscience dictates (244). After years of commanding orders, the European planter has now to depend on his subordinate to hold the fort for him as he abandons it. Things were never the same again in the plantations. After the war and the retreat of the Japanese forces, there was a change in the dynamics of the whole European-Asiatic relationship. Uncle Law realises the extent to which things had changed when he returns to the plantation:
The Asiatic personnel? Were going to have a lot of trouble there. Some of them have come up with a cock-and-bull story about how they saved the company by offering their services during the Japanese Occupation Its true that a fair number of them kept some sort of oganization going for quite a time. They tried to copy our methods. (263)

The collaboration of the colonised in the imperial project had been underestimated as they had been allowed into a space which had been prohibited since the dawn of the plantation enterprise in the country. Uncle Laws strong sentiments on the superiority of the European race will not allow any acknowledgement of the role the Asians played in keeping the plantation operative. Rather, he places them into the mould of mimicry. Their efforts are displaced as comical for the very thought that they could have had the initiative to run the plantation on their own terms is laughable. It is Laws own strategy of retrieving the fallen colonial self. Turning to the plantation field labourers, he finds that there too had the order changed. They complained more frequently when things were not to their satisfaction and were heavily influenced by union leaders from within their own community who were intent on informing the plantation workers of their labour rights. Law can only watch as his fortress crumbles before him:
The mass of Ramasamys was aflame with the fever of organisation. They begged for organization as they had once begged for alms. They dreamed of it night and day. They strove with all their might, not to break ties with Sophia, but to establish new, stronger and more numerous bonds. (319)

His subordinates were intent on fully claiming spaces that were denied to them for decades. In a last bid to salvage the fallen Self, Uncle Law leaves the plantation in the hands of another European, with the parting words We have demanded a

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considerable effort from all of them written in the Managing directors annual report. He thus upholds to the very end the illusion of his role as sovereign commander of the imperial fortress that was the plantation. However, as we have seen, the rules of control were never solely in his hands from the very start. His domination was co-dependent on the collaboration of the labourer within the civilising capitalist mission. In the end, he is faced with the most basic tension of imperialism, that of , in the words of Cooper and Stoler the question of just how much civilising would promote their projects and what sort of political consequences too much civilising would have in store(1997: 7). Ultimately, he finds that he had lost all control over his prized chequerboard as the labourers are now intent on making their own manoeuvres. Makarand Paranjape writes that the diasporic experience [] must involve a significant crossing of borders. These may be borders of a region or a language, but more often are multiple borders such as the loss of homeland would suggest (2001: 5). This, I believe, is highly relevant to the Indian plantation coolies of Malaya, those encountered in the pages of all the narratives that I have investigated thus far. They crossed all these borders that Paranjape speaks of. Their journey which originated in remote villages in South India, brought them across many borders to the ports of Madras and Nagapatnam. From there they went on to transgress the boundary line of their mother country across the dark waters to the plantations of an unfamiliar land, where they were faced with the seemingly fixed boundaries of domination and subordination of the plantocracy. It is thus not surprising that they were rather adept at transgressing the planter-coolie boundary lines within the various plantations that they were sent to. Placed on the colonial chequerboard as pawns to be moved about by the colonialists, they often made their own movements across the squares of the plantocratic chequerboard and had enough agency to unnerve imperial control. In this way the coolies effectively interrupted what was thought to be an impenetrable colonial space. A notable fact that ought not to be glossed over however is that the dominators of space whether within the colonial discursive arena or the subaltern compound were notably male. What about female space? Where does she figure within this arena of domination and subordination, tied to an equally dissonant undertone of imperialism, that of sexuality. How does she claim space on an imperial chequerboard where she is doubly bound in by virtue of her gendered status? The following chapter will proceed to look at the ways in which structures of hegemonic discourse surround the body of the female coolie and how, not unlike the coolies discussed in this chapter, she too often capably devises ways to claim more space for herself.

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Notes
A term for young assistant planters who worked under an experienced planter first to familiarise themselves with the skills of planting. 2 In a number of the Indian immigration reports, planters actually voiced their reservations of the kangany being given so much power in dealing with the labour force. Thus while they needed him to secure power, they were not too pleased when he seemed to gain more leverage than they did in dealings with the coolies. 3 There is a detailed discussion of this notion in my article Manichean Edgings: The Discursive Profiteering of the Malayan Planter in Henri Fauconniers The Soul of Malaya, Reclaiming Places and Spaces: Issues in New Literatures Eds., Ruzy Suliza Hashim and Ganakumaran Subramaniam (Bangi: UKM Press, 2003). 4 I am reminded here of a recent comment by a Malaysian politician in response to the appeal by plantation workers for a fixed monthly salary as opposed to the daily wages that they were subjected to. He intimated that there was no point in supporting such a move for one could not ascertain whether they were really performing their tapping tasks as they were not visible once behind the rubber tree. The remark admittedly raised rather angry comments from the public. Yet, what is ironic is that in Ainsworths description of the scene, the trees obviously gave them cover for agency. This also proves that my investigation of such narrative can dispel the myths that surround the plantation coolie experience.
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CHAPTER THREE GENDERED CHAMBERS

Indian coolies of Malaya, as my discussion has thus far shown, were never mere docile tools of the imperial masters. There were always a number of situations within which they acquired spaces for agency. This feat however was relatively more accessible to the male coolie than it was to his female counterpart. More often than not, one finds that the coolie woman created the space for the male to achieve his agency while she herself was pressed further into the crate of subalternity. The subjugation of the body of the female coolie occurs at various levels. Firstly, the imperial network of discursivity moulds her body in the rhetoric of an exoticised Otherness and by this situates her either as the Eastern temptress or the piteous brown woman who needs the saving hand of the white man. Consequently, in the discourse of the latter, we become aware of the ways in which the coolie woman is subjugated further by members of her own subaltern community. For within her communal space, the Indian woman is used by the Indian male to reinstate power that eludes him in the imperial arena. Indian immigrant women of Malaya come to us cast in various roles that rationed their individual space upon the stage of colonial representation. Many of these women had migrated to escape the shackles of feminine subjectivity in their homeland India; a number of them were widows who did not want to live the life that culture decreed they should in the villages of India1. Yet when they arrived in the new land, they found that the holds of gender discrimination were as far reaching as in the one before. Consequently, its ideological foundations drew several concentric circles around them. Because the coolie woman was not only Other but female Other, she shouldered a weight of subalternity that was twofold. She was at most times a waged labourer but her wages were lower than her male counterpart. Her labour was double as she worked both in the field as well as within her home2. Her body was not only a tool for the plantation industry, it was also sexually exploited by both the colonial Master as well as the male members of her own community. As Virginia Dancz reports:
One planter in 1894 wrote: Not more than 6 coolies should be put in each room, but the planter cooly is most philosophical in this respect, a young unmarried

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Chapter Three woman not objecting in the least to reside with a family or even sharing her quarters if necessary, with quite a few of the opposite sex. That attitude was shared by many planters and managers who learned the labourers language through the sleeping dictionary method. They casually seduced the female Indian labourers. Unattached women were very vulnerable. (1987: 59)

These were the testimonies of planters in official documents or planter bulletins. Many were put forth in the same nonchalant tone, demonstrating their total disregard of the womans choice in the matter. The details of these exploitations are often never revealed in its fullest degree in such accounts for the woman as the afflicted individual is brushed off by a discourse that focuses on the administration and various exploits of the plantocracy. However, autobiographies and novels by planters, as we know, often give us the gaps in the dialogues of empire. It is in their texts that we perceive the symbolic constructs that were invariably appended to the female coolie experience. These depictions are telling examples of the gendered chambers in which coolie women found themselves lodged. Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler have argued that while European colonies may have been seen ideally as sites of unfettered economic and sexual opportunity, there were boundary markers for the latter. These, they explain, were to prevent those [colonizing] men from going native, to curb a proliferating mixed-race population that compromised their claims to superiority and thus the legitimacy of white rule (1997: 5). For every new planter who arrived at a plantation, there was a repeated indictment to stay away from the female labourers. The concern was that any sexual relations with the field workers would interfere with the administering of his authority within that colonial capitalist domain. As John Butcher puts it, it was feared that such an arrangement would involve him [the planter] too deeply with his labourers, possibly lead to favouritism, and affect the efficient management of the estate(1979: 217). However, what planters write of the plantation experience often reveals the many times these boundary lines were crossed, and how its transgression added more strength to the vice-like enclosure that already surrounded the figure of the Indian immigrant woman. In the following discussion I demonstrate the ways in which the colonial imagination placed these women into the double enclosure of gendered encasements. Part of this process will entail a re-tracing of the path into the texts investigated in the previous chapter, singling out the figure of woman that was held in reserve for this discussion. While many of the instances within which the Indian woman is sighted in the colonial texts demonstrate the ways her (racially) gendered position lodged her deep in the chamber of subjugation, I will also show that a number did struggle to claim spaces of their own through acts,

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however minor, that contravened colonial control. Thus once again I prove that the encasement of subalternity was never rigidly fixed in place. In Ainsworths Confessions of a Planter in Malaya, our first introduction to the Indian coolie woman is within the site of violence, if we recall the incident of the Tamil woman tied by her own hair to the posts of her quarters and caned repeatedly by her husband. The scene encapsulates the double deployment of the gendered body within the plantation schemata. Ainsworths colonial vision dominates the coolie womans body as he holds it within his focus and consequently displaces it in eroticised terms. It demonstrates the colonial voyeuristic control of the female body (McClintock 1995: 131), in addition to his economic one. At the same moment, that very body is violated by another male inside a space that he now governs, having stepped out of the boundary of the subaltern work field. The woman however has notably no similar space to retreat to. Sangari and Vaid, on the subject of the public and the private domain of colonial labour (in India), argue that men have always had the advantage of mobility, moving easily between both realms whereas women have always remained largely confined to the private even when involved in the public realm of labour. This is due to their having always culturally and ideologically accepted the power and control of their men however powerless or oppressed the latter may be outside the home (1997: 185). This fact points to the issue of the ceaseless exploitation of the gendered labouring body. There seems to be no reprieve from the structures of domination. What is encountered in the public working space is similarly experienced in the private space of the home. While the male worker could discard his subaltern role at the doorway of his home, the woman did not share this privilege. This is manifestly evident in the numerous representations of the coolie woman in the colonial text. Take for instance the passage below, also from Ainsworths Confessions. It not only reiterates the idea of the controlling eye of the colonialist as it trains on the body of the woman outside the working space. It also demonstrates the Other ways that she could be subjugated because of her gendered status:
the women, also dressed in their fineries, seemed to be new beings as they stood around in the half-light, casting amorous glances at all the men-folk, regardless of race I found myself suddenly and unaccountably drawn towards these glamorous and voluptuous beings that in the course of the ordinary days work were no more than drab, musty-smelling, human weeding machines. (Ainsworth 1933, 83)

This is expressed as Ainsworth stands observing the scene at the coolie communitys celebration of their cultural festival, Tivali. It reveals the transformation of the sign of coolie to coolie as (Other) woman. All of a sudden,

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the female form of the weeding machines of the workforce is recognised and the vision he beholds accentuates their sexuality. Admittedly this sexuality is displaced from its human features for they are beings, a term that emphasises a certain degree of irreconcilability of the image glimpsed. The focus of the vision, trained on the sensuality of the female subject intimates the vulnerability of the latters status as the proprietorial, voyeuristic gaze is not the only means of its possession within the colonial realm. Most of the pioneer planters in Malaya were mainly young, unmarried men. Their state of singlehood was encouraged by the companies that employed them for it was considered expensive to maintain married men. They would have had to pay extra allowances for the wife (and family). Life on the plantations was generally one where the white man lived in almost total isolation with the Asian labouring communities. The result was that these young planters often turned to the female sector of their labour force for sexual relationships (whether consensual or otherwise)3. A letter by a British doctor, published in a British newspaper (qtd. in Butcher 1979) exhibits yet another example of the voyeuristic gaze that constantly fell upon the gendered labouring body and chronicles in turn what consequent sexual possession it was often subjected to :
Think of the young assistant standing all day over Asiatic labour, many of them working with breasts and bodies exposed to the sun, surrounded by women to whom a few dollars are a fortune they would sell the best of themselves, and exposed to the insidious temptations of the heated tropical zone. (205)

The passage reads ostensibly as a defence for the (rather easily) enticed planters by situating the gendered Asian body within the much used colonial stereotype of the sexually available native temptress. Rana Kabbani puts it succinctly when she asserts that the European retained a sense of sensual expectancy from the East, having encountered in both mythological and theological texts the prototype of the seductive Eastern woman (1986: 22). It was this prototype that fed the imagination of the European male in Malaya, judging from the ways in which the figure of the Eastern woman is moulded within its receptacle. This is noticeably reflected in the British doctors attitude towards the woman labourer. Blame is laid on the body of the female, not the mind of the observing male. A scene similar to the one that the doctor envisions can be found in Pierre Boulles Sacrilege in Malaya. We saw the way in which it was imperative that imperial boundaries be preserved at all points by the planters in the discussion of this very novel in the previous chapter. One boundary that was clearly marked out for Maille, the young planter, is, as we already know, that which surrounded the figure of the coolie woman. From the very moment he is ushered into the territory of the plantocracy, Maille is apprised several times of the prohibited sexual engagement with the female Tamil labourer: interfering with

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the female coolies, the Tamil women, is absolutely forbidden(13). Boulle singles out two Indian women on the plantation, both shaped by the prototype of the seductive Eastern female that Kabbani speaks of. The first woman is a field labourer named Muniammah and the passage below allegorically extends upon the British doctors image of the bare-breasted women:
When Muniammah saw the young master approaching through the trees, she tried to cover her mahogany breast with a length of torn scarf which only partly concealed it; and to be on the safe side, she hastily discarded the white flower which she had chosen to wear in her hair that morning. The kangani shouted Whore by way of encouragement. The girl was a novice the presence of Maille, whose possible reactions were an unknown factor, filled her with terror .. [she] bowed her head, covered with confusion and encumbered by her tools, by her bag which hampered her movements and by her breast that kept popping out of the piece of torn cloth. (47)

The first few lines work to dispute implicitly the stereotype of the Eastern temptress. Muniammah struggles to cover her breast as soon as she spots the colonial master approaching. I suggest that the act speaks implicitly of her own awareness (and defence) of her body. She seems to know enough to shield it from the prying colonial eye. The kanganys encouragement as depicted in the passage works to aid and abet the preservation of the sign system of the coolie whore erected by the colonial, even as the woman in question works to dismantle it herself. The status of whore is thus notably imposed onto the body of the female coolie by the male, both from within her community as well as from the outside. It testifies to the doubly bound nature of her position within the plantation world. In addition to this, her body is also simultaneously divested of its humane features by the technique of its description in parts, rather than as a whole, that process of Othering the Oriental subject, relegating them to objects of empire. Muniammahs breast is mahogany (the emphasised colour working to displace its naturalness) and is described as popping out as if it was some alien mechanism rather than a vital and natural part of her female identity. It works to devalue the capacity of her own body to be sexually engaging to the colonial master and consequently deflects possible fractures to the master-coolie divide. Lastly, there is the presence (and consequent discarding) of the flower in her hair, which highlights a number of issues. It is, firstly, an indication of her awareness of her own femininity. Secondly, the fact that it is hastily discarded as soon as the colonial master comes onto the scene, fearing in all probability his reprimand, speaks of an awareness too of her own subordination within the imperial schemata. At the same time, the fact that she had in the first place chosen to wear the flower, in spite of knowing what the consequences may be,

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points to a certain degree of agency within her. There is an interesting account recorded by Vasantha Kannabaran and K Lalitha that is highly relevant in further contextualizing this act of Muniammah. Speaking of the Telangana Womens struggle in British India, they write:
The peasant women from Vempati told us how in those days they did not dare to wear a flower in their hair, or to wear a good sari. It was not simply a question of seeming attractive and thus inviting sexual harassment. The harassment was already there. But the added fear of seeming to step beyond their station in life, and the fear of what punishment it might bring was inhibiting enough. (1997: 184)

The account could very well act as a parallel narrative for Muniammah, as these were the exact conditions within which she laboured, only it was not in the same land, her motherland. In that act of discarding the flower, Muniammah abandons not only a symbol of her femininity but also the boldness that made her place that flower in her hair to begin with. The similarity reveals also that the conditions that migrant Indian women like Muniammah thought they had left behind, were as prevalent, and quite possibly even more testing as they were in a foreign land. In this sense, as much as the depiction of Muniammah reflects her subaltern status within the plantocracy, it reflects also her agency, however implicit. The woman who bows her head in confusion is thus not totally submissive and in this way, Muniammah claims minute spaces for herself on the board that is assumed to be manoeuvred only by the imperialist hand. This is evident at certain other points too. For example, there is the scene where she is reproached by one of the assistant managers for having put down her tools to wash her feet in a ditchpretend[ing] that she had been bitten by a snake and that cold water was the only cure(221). This creates a minor drama that is wrapped up only when she reluctantly goes back to work after being convicted for malingering(221). The director of the plantation, who is at the scene is reportedly immensely pleased and is described as having had the urge to almost hug her for it. This is because, by complying with her orders in the end, Muniammah keeps the formula of dominance and subalternity intact. Also, the whole plantation would have come to a standstill as was normally the case when coolies created little scenes of their own and thereby effectively reduced productivity. The incident demonstrates once again that the power of the planter within the plantation depended quite largely on the collaboration of the coolie. When the coolie happens to be female, the space that is claimed on the board is even more significant for the weight of subalternity was doubled over their figure.

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Muniammah is not the only female coolie represented in Boulles novel. There is another woman of the migrant Indian community who is placed (and subsequently claims her own space) on the colonial chequerboard. The wife of the Indian cook to the planters, she is forced, by her husband, into providing sexual gratification for his master. It appeared that for some reason the indictment to stay away from the Tamil women applied only to the field coolies and not the domestic workers. It is asserted that Sophia turned a blind eye on the cooks wife, she did not, properly speaking, form part of the native personnel (134), hence not so much of a threat to the colonial capitalist scheme of things4. However, the terms used to describe her, hint at the latent threat she poses as the exotic female Other, the temptress, as her body is described through the process of Othering:
Her body could bear comparison with many other bodies. It had even a special distinction of its own. The colour of her skin, for instance, provided a touch of the exotic, the glossy sheen of her long hair, which she combed with her pointed nails, compensated for the pungent smell of the oil in which she soaked it. The slightly elongated oval of her face was by no means unattractive. The little gold studs she wore in her nostrils set her face in a permanent rictus which was not without charm. The blue mark of Siva on her forehead introduced a note of mystery, and her long Indian legs were slimmer and more shapely than those of the other races in Malaya. (136)

The male coolies bodies are never submitted to such detailed scrutiny as their female counterparts. Such precise itemizing of each part of her body demonstrates that the colonial gaze that falls on the body of the coolie woman utilises not only the process of Othering but more importantly a gendered Othering that emphasizes her body as a sexual instrument. The objectification of this (female) body as object of empire is unmistakable in the first sentence. This is duly accentuated by the tabulating of separate parts of it that he deems pleasurable to the eye. It reads almost as an inventory of colonial erotica. In the scene that is drawn out, the possession of the female Indian body that occurs is multilayered. She has already been possessed as a subject of empire. Her gendered status leads to a sexual possession in addition to the former. Lastly, there is in the description of her body what Rana Kabbani terms as visual seduction where the European male writer, armed with language narrates the encounter in a reflective, post-facto narrative; he creates the Orient (1986: 73). The body that is described is annexed by the colonial eye as it reinvents her according to his (Occidental) terms, preserving his self-composure at all times. Note that in that process of Othering, he attempts also to sm(O)ther the inherent threat that he perceives in her, in fulfilment of the stereotype of the dangerous female Other. The allusion to her pointed nails hints at a latent

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savagery which he then declares was kept in check by her husband who had taught her manners (137). By complying with European notions of civilised behaviour, the Indian man himself colludes with European degradation of the supposedly uncivilised Eastern world. While the colonialist may succeed in dominating the body of the cooks wife on these various levels, he cannot however seem to control the response that he desires from her body:
Through lack of enthusiasm the cooks wife was incapable even of stimulating pleasure. Carnal desire was dismayed by the sight of such utter indifference, and if it derived any satisfaction at all it was only by dint of its own feverish imagination which endowed the cooks wife with a symbolic aura of excitement (137-138)

On one level, the argument in the passage effectively maintains that the cooks wife is sexually inept (she was incapable of stimulating him). However, in that very depiction is a counter-narrative of the Indian woman claiming a tiny space for herself as she withholds the response wanted. In so doing, she defeats the dominant colonial male within that sexual space. Her indifference demonstrates an instance in which she is actually able to fracture his commanding grip over her body. However, the countenance of colonial control had to be preserved, and we see this in Mailles admission that the imagination becomes the only tool through which he can command some form of satisfaction from the encounter. It underscores the ways in which discursive (and imaginative) power were the treasured apparatus of colonial control. The episode remains a tiny window into the sexual encounter between the master and his female subordinate, and she is effectively written off from the mainframe of the text. His indulgence in this affair is said to result in her husband exploiting this honour [of having allowed her self-sacrifice] by indulging in gross familiarities and neglecting his proper duties"(140); Maille must, after all, ensure that the borders of the imperial divide remained intact. However, its presence does demonstrate that as hemmed in as they were by the politics of gender from both sides of the imperial divide, coolie women did not all sit in total submissiveness. Ive thus far looked at the way the body of the female was employed as a sexual tool by the colonial master, aided by her male partners or superiors from within her own community. There is another experience that was hers to bear as a woman and that is alluded to in two of the texts looked at. It is that of childbirth. Initially, Indian women were not specifically recruited for the reproduction of plantation labour as conditions in the plantations were thought to be not conducive for female labour. However, this changed in the 1920s. Arasaratnam explains that it was around this time that kanganies began to

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recruit more families rather than individual labour to maintain a more settled labour force. This, he says, was primarily to act as a deterrent against rampant sexual crimes against women in the plantations. It was also a move that was thought to be more economical for the planters as women and children could be employed for the lighter workload such as weeding, in which they could be paid less. Arasaratnam also adds that this change became the catalyst for a transformation of the Indian labour force as with the advent of women, more Indians were born on Malayan soil and it set into motion their naturalization to the land(1970: 32). I see this as the beginnings of a diasporic grounding. These changes noticeably place the body of the Indian coolie woman centre-stage. Not only was she the producer of labour and food for her family but she was equally responsible for the production of life in the labour lines, the growth of her community (and labour for the capitalist colonial plantocracy). The question is: did she gain any leverage at all from this important role? The following passages offer a rather overpowering answer. They give us a glimpse of this new grounding of diaspora in two differing outlooks. The first, from Ainsworths Confessions is almost dismissive of it while the second, from Bushs Pahang reveals its darker undertone. In the former, an Indian coolie woman from a gang of Tamil women who were employed on weeding the newly-planted areas of young rubber trees (60) unexpectedly goes into labour in the middle of the workday and delivers her child in the field. The details of the labour are recorded as such:
The expectant mother on the ground set up the most stupendous howling and groaning. This was almost instantly taken up by about a hundred of the other women, who came rushing from their work and surrounded her, till complete pandemonium reigned and almost deafened me as I stood there, feeling utterly helpless, wondering what I ought to do about it all but I had nothing much to fear or worry about, however for very soon the woman on the ground produced her baby with no more effort than a hen takes to lay an egg, and appeared none the worse for her experience. (61)

The first line already displaces the woman into the realm of the Other as she howls and groans. The imagery moulds her into bestial rather than human terms, which is then borne out in his depiction of her delivery, where she produces her baby. The term effectively displaces both mother and child from the crucial moment of the creation of a new life. By associating the delivery of her newborn to that of a hen laying eggs he once again lodges her into the realm of (dehumanised) Other. Yet, note that in that moment of her labour, the Indian woman is surrounded by a network of other coolie women who take over the administration of the delivery. By doing so, they render the colonial master ineffectual as they take control. This is

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clearly evident in his admission of helplessness. However, the entire episode is conveyed in a tone that dismisses its significance not only to the woman but also to the entire coolie community as a life is brought forth on foreign soil, the newborn cry of diaspora. It testifies to Ainsworths view of coolie lives as nothing more than mere economic tools of production. Now, compare the above to the following excerpt from Bushs narrative:
A Tamil girl, married, not more than thirteen years old, sat leaning against the board wall, held there by one of the older women of the compound. Her child face held all the torture in the world, and as my eyes adjusted themselves to the dimmer lights of the room, I saw the youngsters body convulse horribly. Her eyes stood out from her head, and then she went limp. She was stark naked and was giving birth to a child. (171)

In this depiction of the young Indian woman in labour, we witness again the sweep of the colonial gaze taking in the scene, penetrating what should have been the private space of delivery. Yet, because she is subaltern and space was never hers to own in the plantation compound, her experience is laid bare to the penetrating gaze of the dominant colonial master. Note how her body is charted by the intruding gaze as she experiences the act of delivery. The visualisation marks out her body and registers not so much the system that holds the womans body in fee to the torturous setting but rather the community of coolies whose unsanitary lifestyle is mostly to be blamed. Bush declares that the birth is aided by two older Indian woman who pulled and tugged at her with hands that had never known soap and nails that were long and held all the filth of the lines (191). He immediately pulls himself away from the scene sick and dizzy. The first thought that crosses his mind is that he has been privy to life and probably death- in there next will come the funeral drums and the hired mourners. For one at least-probably both (171). The birth of a child, the delivery of life (and consequently the birth of the story of diaspora) is reduced to a spectacle that accentuates the laborious way with which women experienced the plantation world. The woman in labour is objectified in that entire visualisation, her impending death seen as no more than a normal occurrence for him. The women who surround her are dismissed as darkly comical characters who laugh rather sinisterly at her ordeal. Encapsulated within that however is the framework of this chapter, of woman as the bearer of diaspora (though the child in question is not seen uttering its first cry). The incident that Bush witnesses sparks off a treatise on the hygiene practises of the coolie community and the resultant diseases they contracted, with the refrain Keep down the death rate interspersed at intervals. At the heart of his diatribe lies the story of another female coolie named Maraiie, and her tragic fate in the coolie lines. Maraiie, Bush informs us, was married when

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she was two months old to a boy Sinna Tamby, six years her seniors(175) but the actual wedding ceremony is conducted when she turns eleven. While he recites the story, he takes time to certify that she had developed into a graceful, birdlike little lady of exceptional beauty whose bright chatter and tinkling laughter were easily distinguishable among the jabbering throngs of the lines and kampongs (175). The depiction clearly places her in a different category from the female labourer seen above, who remained unnamed and unrecognisable. Maraiie has caught the Masters attention and in his tale she becomes the victimised Oriental woman who suffers at the hand of her insensitive male partner. It is this victimisation that appeals to Bushs stand as hero of his world (both the plantation as well as the narrative one). Kabbani mentions that most (male) Western representations of the desirable Eastern woman hardly ever portrayed her as foreign looking but that she instead conformed closely with conventional standards of European beauty in stark contrast to the undecipherable angular figures of the rest (1986: 83). The tinkling laughter and brightness that Bush associates with Maraiie is indeed in stark contrast to the other, almost amorphous female figures present in the text, seldom portrayed in detail, as we saw in Boulles differentiation between the cooks wife and Muniammah the field labourer5. What proceeds next is in line with most Orientalist accounts of relationships between Indian men and women, where, as Rajeswary Sunder Rajan aptly puts it, by foregrounding Hindu women as passive and unresisting victims of Hindu patriarchy, as these [imperial texts] do, it could be established beyond argument that the women were in need of saving(1993: 45). Maraiie is moulded into this submissive victim of Hindu patriarchy in the narrative, while Bush himself ironically adopts the stand of the patriarchal planter by his very narration. Sinna Thamby is described as a a gay young Lothario who, although but sixteen years of age, had experienced many careless amours with the promiscuous girls and women of the kampongs, [and] was thoroughly and permanently saturated with the secondary stages of syphilis(176). Marraie on the other hand is described as the child bride who waits trembling in the house of her lord and master Sinna Thamby. What is ironic here is that Bush himself is lord and master of the plantation and thus also of the coolies and yet this is not seen in concurrence with Sinna Thambys part. This points to the double weight of the discourse of patriarchy that surrounded the figure of the Indian woman, both from within her community and from the all-presiding lord and master of the plantation, the planter. Bush continues his tale of the victimisation of young Maraiie by offering details of the wedding ceremony. He asserts that in the morning after, Sinna Thamby comes dancing out of his quarters, shouting with great pride for all present to bear witness that his bride was a virgin (177) in full embellishment of the tale of the

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defilement of the innocent little girl, who in our country, would be finding her greatest thrill in an ice-cream soda at the corner drug store (178). The comparison distinctly establishes the oppressive life of young Indian girls like Maraiie while it simultaneously validates the more compassionate face of (privileged) Western civilisation. However, he fails to mention that he is also part of this system that victimises her for Maraiee is a field labourer and working conditions would never have allowed for the leisure that the girl in his country was privy to. He continues her story thus:
Not long afterward, Maraiies laughter is not so bright. She grows quieter. As the weeks pass into months, the joy of living seems to go out of her entirely. She does not go out to the fields anymore with the other natives. A baby is about to arrive. Then malignant malaria strikes Maraiie, driving the disease she has contracted from her husband into destructive activity throughout her, by now, emaciated body. In her delirium she gets up from her bed in an unguarded moment, makes her way to the drinking well, and jumps to the bottom. (177)

Maraiie remains an objectified body throughout his narration, a symbol of the repercussions of the supposedly unenlightened ways of her people. The colonial gaze, after reflecting every detail of the episode in romanticised terms, writes the figure of Maraiie off the pages of his narrative. We learn that she dies shortly afterward along with her baby and both are borne on the one litter by four native men to the place where a shallow hole has been dug in a field of elephant grass. During the night the wild hogs will come and root out the bodies and eat them: the usual end of a rubber tapper(177). Within moments, Maraiie is forgotten as in the next paragraph Bush continues with another bout of epidemic that hits the plantation. The young girl is merely a tool for the planters commentary on the customs and manners of his labour force. However, in the tale that he tells, it becomes apparent that the Indian woman was moulded by two discourses of patriarchy as in both worlds she is subject to male intervention. The death of the child symbolises too the struggle of the birth of diaspora in those pioneer days as the body of the Indian woman labours in turn to embody that birth from within the confines of the double chamber of gender. Though these are mainly momentary glimpses of the figure of the Indian woman as reflected in the eyes of the planter, they are crucial reflectors of the double discourse of colonial and communal patriarchy that drew the walls that surrounded this doubly entrenched domain of female subjugation. At the same time they show too that the gaze of Pratts colonial seeing-man was never wholly powerful in possessing the colonised body within the landscape of his master narrative. There were always intermittent scenes of disruption that broke its custodial vision.

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This chapter and the preceding ones have concentrated on the articulation of the figure of the coolie by colonial officials and those on the Occidental side of the planter-coolie divide. However, there is another significant portal that reflects the disruption of colonial space and that is through the counter narratives that are produced by postcolonial writers who articulate the coolie encounter in their works of fiction, postcolonial revisions of colonial visions.

Notes
Evidently, a number of Indian women actually resorted to forming illegal liaisons or what was termed in Tamil certu-k-kolu-tali with men to enable them to migrate. The union was actually an alliance that was not performed according to the actual Indian marriage rites, and once in the estate, divorce was not difficult to obtain. Ideally the woman had only to return the tali, and if she so wished, marry again, which in fact spoke of an autonomy that she would not have had in her original village (Dancz 1987: 59; Heidemann 1992: 65). 2 A rather excellent sourcebook for general discussions of women and the experience of the coolie system is Shobita Jain and Rhoda Reddock eds., Women Plantation Workers: International Experiences (Oxford:Berg, 1998). 3 For a detailed explanation on the types of sexual alliances that were common among planters and Asian women, whether of the labour force or the surrounding Asian villages, see John G Butchers The British in Malaya 1880-1941:The Social History of a European Community in Colonial South East Asia Singapore: (Oxford University Press, 1979). 4 According to John Butcher It was one of the iron laws of conduct that a planter should not take one of the female labourers on his estate as his mistress. It was feared that such an arrangement would involve him too deeply with his labourers, possibly lead to favouritism, and affect the efficient management of the estate. When a planter was discovered to have broken this rule, he could expect to lose his job (1979: 216). 5 See Chapter 2 for instances where women are presented in his narrative in such manner, where they either crawl on the floor in a piteous mass or cackle sinisterly like the women in the labour scene prior to this.
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CHAPTER FOUR POST COLONIAL REVISIONS

As Ashcroft, Tiffin and Griffiths of The Empire Writes Back cogently argue:
The seizing of the means of communication and the liberation of post-colonial writing by the appropriation of the written word become crucial features of the process of self-assertion and of the ability to reconstruct the world as an unfolding historical process. (2002: 81)

The power of narrativity in the hands of the postcolonial writer allows for the reinsertion of the subaltern into written history and these previously subjugated figures are shifted from the periphery to the centre of narrative space. This creates an avenue for the reclamation of subalternised ground and in this chapter I show how a postcolonial Malaysian Indian author reconfigures the coolie experience and produces counter-narratives to colonial discursivity. KS Maniam is at present the only Malaysian Indian creative writer who delves into the intricacies of the early coolie experience of Malaya. This perhaps is largely due to the fact that he has experienced firsthand the politics of subalternity within the coolie community1. His father worked as a dhobi2 in a hospital laundry which bordered a plantation. Maniam spent his early primary education at a Tamil school there. He best sums up the politics of subjugation that governed the lives of the coolie community, whether from the plantation or any other location of supposedly unskilled labour, in the following passage, where he recounts how, as a young boy from the coolie lines, his greatest desire was to receive an education in the English medium:
I knew that an education in English was not for the so-called coolies' children. Even the post-Japanese years, coloured as they were by a sense of liberation, did nothing to erode the barriers between the employer and the employed. The former were the rulers, and the latter, simply, the ruled. [] It was therefore breaking an unwritten rule for a boy from the lines the rows of cubicles where the workers lived to want to attend an English school. (1999)

The transgressing of such rules not only eroded class barriers but also the slats that would have otherwise kept him from entering the world of narrativity,

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beyond which lay the portal for the manifestation of the coolie experience in written form. In Maniams reconstruction of the Indian immigrant experience in Malaya, subaltern ground is reclaimed and reinstated through the eyes of an insider, and the passage below, from his first novel, The Return, is an example of his creative restitution of coolie memory:
My grandmothers life and her death, in 1958, made a vivid impression on me. She came, as the stories and anecdotes about her say, suddenly out of the horizon, like a camel, with nothing except some baggage and three boys in tow. And like that animal which survives the most barren of lands, she brooded, humped over her tin trunks, mats, silver lamps and pots, at the junction between the main road and the laterite trail. Later she went up the red dusty path, into the trees and bushes, the most undeveloped part of Bedong. The people of this small town didnt know how she managed, but they saw her before a week had passed, a settled look on her face, a firm gait to her walk. (Maniam1993: 1)

After the many partial glimpses of the Indian immigrants refracted from the lenses of the imperial gazers, the passage above finally acquaints us with a different view. It is the post-colonial repositioning of the subaltern as key figure in the text. It draws to the surface the individual that colonialism suppressed and reinstates them at the forefront of a narrative. In that introductory passage too is the establishment of the continuity between subaltern history and diasporic sensibility, a continuum of stories and anecdotes, the unofficial documents of subaltern existence which neither gained entry into the official history of imperialism nor were they known to the planters and other colonial officials who presided over their work days. The image of the woman hesitating at the junction of two roads perceptively evokes the issue of choice that lay in the hands of many women and men who were not unlike this character from the novel, people who migrated to Malaya, making that crucial journey of change and the decisions that they had to make of their own calling. With this, we get to see the Indian immigrant as someone other than a production tool of empire. Those few items that she carries with her may at first glance be read as mere cultural paraphernalia but a further contemplation of them reveals their significance. They were symbols of a transferred personal history, carted across the sea to be set down in new soil, migratory temples of their familiar, which then becomes the cultural edifice for generations to come. These are the details that were left out of colonial inscriptions of the Indian immigrant experience. When located in the hands of the postcolonial artist, they are given life and meaning as such individual characters are testimony of a lived history. As the postcolonial imagination strives to rearticulate its subaltern history, such figures become the ground upon

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which the grand narratives of imperialism are displaced. Imperial signs of subalternity are reshaped to generate a redefinition of cultural memory. As Homi Bhabha argues,
to reconstitute the discourse of cultural difference demands not simply a change of cultural contents and symbols; a replacement within the same time-frame of representation is never adequate. It requires a radical revision of the social temporality in which emergent histories may be written, the rearticulation of the sign in which cultural identities may be inscribed. (1994: 171)

Such reconstitutions work primarily to displace the impact of the powerful colonial gaze that remained trained on the body of communal history for decades, and to insert a counter narrative that releases the latter from the hold of the former. The restorative potion lies, by and large, in the repository of cultural memory. Often the figures that are at its centre are those of the elders of the community, those who played no substantial part in the colonial narrative imagination and whose personal histories become the legacy that lights the darkened passageway of the concaves of the Indian immigrant experience. When before, the immigrant coolies were merely extras in the plot of empire, their journeys and experiences irrelevant to the colonial writer and thus unknown to the readers, here the postcolonial imagination articulates those disregarded details and fills in the gaps left on the inherited murals of imperial discursivity. In another scene in the same novel the narrator recalls how they, the children in the village:
moved in to listen to the saffron-scented, death-churned memories, stories, experiences and nostalgia. She was a child, a young girl, a new bride and a widow. There was a rasping wind in her voice, cold fear, romance exalting strength and devastation. She blubbered most about the sea, crooning to it, beseeching for a safe passage with her tin trunks. Some mornings she was a freshly harvested field, smelling of stalks and churned earth [they] leaned against the curve of the land she built, now with desolating winds, now with a dark and humid soil and filled with abundant fruit. Yet it was also a land haunted by ghosts, treaded lightly by gods and goddesses, violated by murderers, where a widow went through fire to reach a dead husband (10)

The passage paints the picture of an Indian immigrant in Malaya emerging through the passageway of a past coated with the labyrinthine colours and textures of cultural memory, recreating a stage upon which the sights and sounds and scents adorn the figure of the muted coolie of imperial narratives. It registers her in the various roles of daughter, wife and consequently widow, the last prompting her migration across the seas. We witness the anxiety of crossing

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that very sea to a new land and the faith and hope that she gathers around her body, mantras for a sanctuary sought in flight. It reveals too the mixed feelings she has for her motherland. The saffron-scent of new harvest mingles with the colder and harsher scent of the subjugation of women and the wispy footfalls of deities hint at the sense of disillusionment that compels taking leave of ancestral soil. Migration provides new hope and a new role for people like Periathai and on the canvas of the postcolonial imaginative rearticulation of the coolie. These personal portraits re-place her on the theatrical space of a history that had before robbed her and others like her, of such depth and colour. In this chapter I trace the details of the precarious voyage of self (and communal) re-collection in Maniams works of fiction as these are the foundations of the diasporic identity that the present day Malaysian Indian has inherited.

Initial Rites of passage


As far as I can recall there had been only one great adventure in his lifehis escape from India to Malaysia. There were times when he muttered and mumbled during his toddy-soaked carelessness, and it was through these moments of indiscretion that his story came through to me. Thinking back I realise that that was how he tried to pull himself out of his limp helplessness. The faint, flickering light and the night silence created shadows and echoes that could have been of another man and another place. The place was another country, India: the time, another era that comes though me in a strange way. Can memories be inherited? Can repetition make actual the past? (Maniam 1994: 4)

The excerpt above, from Maniams novel In a Far Country, artistically renders the dynamics of the legacy of diaspora and the emergence of the subaltern into textual space as he is re-collected in the present through the memories of his descendant. The speaker, the lead character of the novel, is a Malaysian Indian man named Rajan whose mind, awash with memories of his Indian immigrant ancestry, pieces together the narrative of displacement that he has inherited. The subject of his thoughts is his father, a former plantation coolie of Malaya. Within that space that is created, the muted subaltern voice of the past has a chance of being articulated in the present. The stereotypical figure of imperial enunciation is infused with more life than was ever given in the discourse of the latter. The image of his father drawing himself out of his sentiment of helplessness by constantly revisiting and recounting the past reinstates the subaltern figure as a self recollecting and self-asserting subject. This reflects an important strategy of the postcolonial perspective which, according to Bhabha, situates culture as an enactive, enunciatory site [that] opens up possibilities for other times of cultural meaning and other narrative spaces (1992: 443).

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In the enunciation of his fathers past (which is as much communal as it is a personal history) in the present, that Other time of subalternity is given a place within Rajans narrative space. This is the liberatory discursive strategy that as Bhabha explains, provides a process by which objectified others may be turned into subjects of their history and experience (444). Within Maniams restitution of the previously suppressed narrative of the subaltern, we are given an insight into what the voyage across was like for the colonial plantation labourers. Rajans father remembers :
the boat we came in was crowded and foul. The hulls were rusted. When I drank water from the taps there was only a taste of rust. And the human dung-all over the place. The men not even closing the door. The door too rusted to be closed. The women with just the saris over their thighs, to hide their shame. Sometimes no water even to wash, to flush away the human filth. (5)

The vivid description re-enacts the deplorable conditions of the voyage to the new country in detail and the subaltern is situated as an active subject of that historical moment. He is drawn experiencing its materiality as he tastes the rust, he notes the humiliation that they had to undergo. When he next refers to the voyage, he denounces that vessel in which he came as those peoples dung filled ship (7). Through this postcolonial imaginative rearticulation of the subaltern experience, an agency that was never acknowledged in the crammed space of colonial discourse makes its way to the forefront. Such discursive enunciations work to liberate it from the iron grip of imperialisms repressive portrayals. This is also reflective of what Bill Ashcroft has termed as the postcolonial resistant strategy of interpolation. It refers to the entry, aggressive or benign of post-colonial acts and modes of representation into the dominant discourse (of colonialism) itself, an interpolation which not only interjects and interrupts that discourse but changes it in subtle ways(2001: 14). Such acts he explains ultimately reveal the fundamentally allegorical nature of history itself (15), question its authority and uncover its discursive limitations. When Maniam inserts the subaltern into his narrative space, it disrupts earlier colonial discourse. The figure who was arbitrarily packed into the hulls of the colonial steamships is here depicted with a sense of awareness of his subaltern status. In this way, postcolonial rearticulation closes the distance between the colonial eye and its previous discursive domination of the subaltern figure, resulting in a strategic liberatory appropriation of colonial formulations of the coolie. In Maniams counter-discursive space, the boundaries of these colonialist limitations are interpolated by accounts from the Other side. The subaltern is duly re-positioned as the experiencing (and narrating) subject:

Post Colonial Revisions I looked out at the water rolling past us. How vast and clear it looked! Going somewhere deep down. Had its own life. Our lives just small handfuls of dirt. Dropped into the ocean, they just disappeared. (7)

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The gaze of the colonised moves into the visual space that has previously been dominated by the lenses of the colonial Seeing Eye. It transforms that landscape with the inclusion of an emotive layer left out of the latters dismissive sweep. As the lost space of the coolie is reclaimed, the caricatured imperial markings begin to fall off and we see them becoming creators of their own narrative. With these changes, it becomes increasingly possible to retrieve the beginnings of the story of the formation of the diasporic Indian identity that is the legacy of every Malaysian Indian today. Consequently we witness too how the trauma of initial displacement transgressed to the newer site of multiculturalism that exists in the present. The push and pull factors of historical documentation are translated into the narratives of hope that these early migrants sketched for themselves as they left a country that seemed to have failed them. Rajans father summarizes his flight from India thus:
One lands grass dies, anothers jungle is cool and full of fruits. Like bats we come to the fruit trees. Then were caught in the net. (6)

Yet, as that allegory of the net informs us, the journey led them straight into the capitalist nets of empire that withheld promised fruit. Having entered the British colony hoping to find manna of their own, the Indian immigrants found themselves within the utopian venture of British imperialism, only its racial divide created a webbed wall of dystopia that held them fast. They were trapped in a foreign land and exiled into bondage to a foreign force. Dislodged from everything that was familiar, their only antidote to the situation appeared to be in creating a utopia of their own. This shaped itself into an ideal India of the imagination, as was common to most South Asian immigrants to the colonies of the imperial forces. The transplanted Indian individuals, having no land to belong to, rooted themselves to this imaginary territory, which gained mythic proportions in their minds. Ownership of this imaginary land assuaged their landless position in the new country. In Maniams reconstruction of the coolie past, the production units of imperial narratives become in many senses authors of a new narrative of India. They invest it with a power to uphold the overseas Indian self. The planters we learn were not the only ones creatively crafting out their memories. Furthermore, just as the latter used the plantation world to uphold his sense of self, the coolies, I demonstrate, use their newly created India of the imagination for the same purpose. Did this relocated Indian identity, rooted in the utopian India of the mind, suffer the same fate as all other utopias, i.e. did it never migrate out of its state

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of elysium? Continuous residence would have ultimately led to a suspended identity, a state of exile in a world that was neither Indian nor Malayan. This hold of the ancestral world was deeply compelling. Part of the reason why the Indian immigrant community sought refuge in the epic world of Mother India was because of a deep fear of the unknown. Colonial narratives offer merely glimpses of their faith in the religious world that they kept alive even in the most remote of plantations. Their haven of retreat was constantly the hallowed hall of the estate temple that housed their deities, rich only in the hopes of an impoverished community. Through the strategy of Othering however, colonial writers dismissed this part of their lives to the margins of their discourse, as they concentrated on maintaining the composure of imperial control. The result was a framework that never allocated anything more than a transitory space on its textual surface. These boundaries are pushed back in postcolonial reconstructions such as the ones by Maniam. Through its interpolative manoeuvres, we now progress into the corners that were never touched on, as their hopes and fears are laid out on the surface of its re-textualisation. Rajan remembers that during his childhood
The land beyond [the plantation] was hardly explored. Because this familiar environment filled them with so much pain and suffering, the land beyond this familiar pain was avoided as some territory of even greater pain. (1994: 44)

Here Maniam articulates the formation of the diaspora of exclusivism born as a result of nineteenth century classical capitalist circumstances. In that reluctance to transgress the boundaries of the estate in fear of the unknown, is perhaps a deep seated anxiety of admitting their irrelevance in a foreign land. As in the words of Ashis Nandy most utopias fear thoughts which may sabotage them, features which may acknowledge their mortality, and situations which may make them irrelevant(1986: 3). Admitting the mortality of the utopia they created would have been akin to admitting the mortality of the Indian self residing away from the folds of the ancestral soil. Everything that would have accentuated the futility of retaining a stronghold on their motherland was shunned. This included the adopted land, for fear that it may in the end usurp the motherland and render her and subsequently them, irrelevant. The ground of subalternity is no more hollow. The childlike people depicted in colonial narratives are here transfigured into guardians of their own mythical land. In this sense, it would not have taken the planter much to keep these coolies within the confines of the plantation as they were already in a form of voluntary exile. Clem Seecharan, on the subject of the Indian diaspora in British Guiana (Guyana) that arose out of similar nineteenth century imperial capitalist ventures as did its counterpart in Malaya, asserts that

Post Colonial Revisions because many retained no direct contact with India, their conception of it tended to assume mythical dimensions: the heroic, ethereal, idyllic AryanIndia of the Hindu epics a Golden Age- lodged permanently in the Indo-Guyanese psyche. This inviolable, surreal India was a potent, malleable instrument of selfpreservation, of racial dignity, in a society where few, if any, dared to challenge European definitions of the human condition. (1993: 10)

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Such was also the fate of the migrant Indian community in Malaya. The colonial overseers placed them in subordinate categories which denied their humanity and self-respect. However, the coolies actively created another world out of the vestiges of ancestral memory. Within its sacred space, they could seek solace from a familiarity that could in turn be set against the greater onslaught of imperial displacement. While the forces outside worked to strip away their self worth, within this sacred compound the re-collection of the ancestral world forged their own emblem of an undiminished Indian self. Consequently, anything that was seen as likely to fracture this intact self was shunned. Over time, the consoling apparition of the motherland grew to eclipse the actual presence of the adopted land. They lived, to all intents and purposes, in a suspended world of their own creation. This was their exclusivist little India of the imagination. The power of this mythical space over the consciousness of the coolie community constantly presents itself in the recollections of Maniams lead character. For instance, Rajan of In a Far Country remembers that the world that the plantation community inhabited was one that seemed to thrive most on the impalpable terrain of ancestral legacy:
When I came into adolescence, Deepavali was, for me, held within a circle of mystery. People seemed to be taken out of themselves. The estate lines were transformed. The songs that came form the valve-set radios reached into a more complex and deeper harmony. Somehow the dingy, green plank houses did not rest just on earth-bound stilts; they cushioned themselves on an invisible axis of enchantment. (8)

The invisible axis of enchantment that shields the community (of plantation workers and their families) is none other than the utopian shroud of the imaginary Indian landscape. It takes the edge off the harsh reality of estate life, of the monotony of tapping, the squalid living quarters and life far away from a familiar motherland. It is a force that buttresses even the pillars of the houses, an indication that, for these transplanted Indian individuals, the soil of the adopted land is looked upon as incapable of sustaining their homes. In their celebration of the festival of Deepavali is the commemoration of the triumph of good over evil. Its annual re-enactment is the hope that their presence in the new land would be triumphant over the adversities of estate life.

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Colonial documentation (both literary and historical) constantly alludes to the coolie holidays that needed to be adhered to, to keep the labour force contented. Through such re-articulations in the postcolonial realm, we become aware of its importance to the coolies themselves. It transforms from mere imperial indulgence to an essential cultural ingredient in the remedial potions sought out for their survival in a foreign land within which treasures were relentlessly withheld from them. Similar scenes grace the pages of Maniams other novel The Return, to which we were introduced in the previous chapter. The lead character, Ravi, remembers his childhood (not unlike the setting of Rajans above) as one within which they
were inhabitants of an invisible landscape tenuously brought into prominence by the lights, mango leaves strung out over the doorways, the pilgrimages to Sri Subramanya temple in Sungai Buloh on Thaipusam day, the painting of the bull horns the day after Ponggal and the many taboos that covered our daily lives Whenever we left for a long trip, we couldnt glance over our shoulders at the house or say Im going. You had to utter Im coming. With these gestures and words you continued existence. One wrong move brought you closer to the gates of Neraka, hell. (1993: 13-14)

We have once again the allusion to the invisible land, the imaginary motherland, India, and the hold it has over the community. The cultural emblems are significant of the communitys retention of ancestral legacy. The cultural taboos that govern their lives speak not only of the effort to retain every feature of the Indian self. It also demonstrates the deep seated fear that failure to adhere to them would have disastrous consequences. If the utopian reign of the motherland (and all her attendant customs) was deemed irrelevant, it then simultaneously meant the death of the overseas Indian self as well. While the colonial planters struggled to maintain the balance between self and Other, the coolies we see had their own binary struggles to contend with. Thus while imperial orders dominated most facets of their lives, within the personalised spaces of their world, they shaped a counter discourse of survival. It became a vibrant text decorated by a brilliance of forceful myths and legends that constantly re-enacted the clashes between good and evil:
How does one describe the land one lived in but never saw? It was more tangible than the concrete one we flitted through every day. Darkness gave it its true dimensions. Then it vibrated in our hearts. We were hemmed in into our rooms, houses, and into our minds. But for all these, there were a lot of colours in our invisible world. Fair, gentle men and women (gods and goddesses I suppose), fought off the more scheming and brutal characters in battles that clashed over our sleeping heads, The tension between good and evil shimmered therefore like an inevitable consciousness within our heads. (14)

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The mythical India of the imagination became the Promised Land, a pathway to freedom from the otherwise edged in world of the estate in which they reside. Their celebrations of the various festivals were significant affirmations of the link to the motherland, seeking solace in the conviction that the features of the Indian selfdom had not been corroded by the journey across the sea. In other words, they believed they had triumphed over the evil of crossing the dark waters, which were to have erased all trace of their caste. This new narrative of survival endorsed their Indian self at every turn and became a buffer state that warded off imminent threats. It is no wonder then that the planters had to constantly prise their labour force away from the temples at the heart of every plantation. They were fighting a well defended utopian state. However as Ashis Nandy argues, an overly determined attempt to actualize a utopia can turn it into a dystopia [anti-utopia] for many or destroy its pull by exposing it to the harsh light of human experience (1986: 3). Maniam demonstrates the ways in which an obsessive adherence to this imaginary land leads to destruction. The following exploration of the short narrative The Pelanduk dramatises the ways in which this imaginary India ultimately becomes the very thing that cripples their selfdom as it shows the disastrous consequences of life caught within the destructive mesh of the invisible landscape3. The plot revolves around the residents of an Indian settlement on the fringes of the Malaysian jungle. This community, having lost contact with India for more than a generation, depended upon the more learned to interpret a vaguely remembered cosmogony (89). They are totally immersed in the imaginary Indian world, and take pride in their ability to deftly minister the ritual of retreat from all parties unconnected to their transplanted Indian world. The helmsman of this isolated world is Govidan, who becomes their guiding spirit and pundit (89), interpreter of the vaguely remembered cosmogony. However, it is explained that his was a deviational Hindu philosophy that, denied the checks of native soil practise, evolved strange myths for itself (89). Bereft of the original soil that nourished their mythology, fables are concocted to mask the fissures that would otherwise shred their imaginary landscape. Govindan takes on the role of the spiritual defender of the sacred land and its signifiers of Indian identity. The community adheres to his every instruction as they are governed by the fear of anything that threatened the immortality of their mythical world. Thus when they are warned that the universe had entered a destructive period(89), the age of Kali, and are advised that someone from amongst them must volunteer to serve the course of Kaliamma(91) by sacrificing a deer, the community tries their level best to comply4. They are initially apprehensive as the deer is a protected animal of the government of the adopted land. In fact in Malaya it goes by another name, pelanduk. I suggest that Maniams employment of this term in the title of the story instead of its Tamil or even

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English version is significant to the thematic core of the narrative, that of the problematical feat of translating and transplanting ancestral liturgy purely and wholly in a new land. The deer is not only known by another name in the new land, it also has its own set of significances which does not correlate with their own. This deer that Govindasamy speaks of is the golden deer of their ancestral epic Ramayana, the very creature responsible for the abduction of Sita. In the epic, the demon king Ravana orders his counsellor, Maricha, to transform himself into a beautiful golden deer to enchant the exiled couple, Rama and Sita. His task was to lure Rama away long enough so that his master could kidnap Sita. Govindan is not only the spiritual guide for the community. He is also the guardian of ancient lore, translating its symbolism for the transplanted community:
It was a golden deer and while Rama, Sita and Lakshamana (Ramas bother) watched, it gambolled and changed its hues. Now it was the rippling wave of a green field, now the azure of a lofty sky, now the sparkle of sapphire, diamond and pearl. Capture it for me, Sita said. I suspect some mischief Lakshamana said.. :if you cant take it alive, put an arrow in it, Sita said. Even the skin itself is a treasure! While Lakshmana watched over Sita, Rama went in pursuit. Maricha as the golden deer was too swift for Rama, but not for his arrow. As the arrow struck the deer Maricha regained his own form. Rama was deceived. We know what

happened when he returned to the ashraman. (92) The text that is created is not the published text of colonial discursivity but is rather the oral text of folk memory, recontextualising epic memory. It emphasises the fact that subaltern history is often found in the vestiges of this alternative world. On another level, the insertion of Govindasamys retelling of this episode into the narrative space is indicative also of Maniams postcolonial interpolation of Other texts into its boundaries. Above all, the sequence of events that transpires demonstrates the self-translating diasporic imaginary. By this I mean that the story is itself re-enacted in the lives of this community of diasporic Indians. The ending that Govindasamy glosses over is the abduction of Sita by Ravana, for determined to fulfil his obligation to his master, Maricha calls out for help in Ramas voice, intending to lure Lakshman to the scene. He succeeds in his mission as the moment Lakshman leaves Sitas side, he leaves her vulnerable to Ravana. The demon king spirits her away to the land of Lanka. The deer is ultimately the symbol of mistrust and destruction. The community is thus directed to find and destroy this animal. With this deed, they would be symbolically destroying the force which may abduct in turn their mythical motherland. It is significant too that the deity who presides over this is

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the Mother Goddess Kaliamma. The deer must be killed to appease her and consequently keep their ancestral world intact:
Man has to solve the riddle of existence: are we a dream or are we real? He has to destroy everything he has known to reach the other realm. He must take vengeance upon himself [] He has to discover the magic that will take him out of the dream. (90)

The events that unfold bear strong resemblance to the episode of the golden deer of the Ramayana. We are exhibited with the creative interpolation of ancestral text onto the new ground of diaspora. This creative ingenuity of the diasporic imaginary in transfiguring ancient lore is reflected not only in the surrounding landscape however. As plans are made to seek out this mythical deer in the forest, a newcomer, Pandian, steps into the compound of the settlement. The epic, I argue, is literally translated upon the body of this newcomer, an allegorical manifestation of the embodiment of the diasporic imaginary. Pandian is initially taken in by the solidarity of the community as they extend their hospitality to him. However, he soon becomes aware of, and consequently, discontented with the ritual of retreat that they practise. His means of escape becomes the town, the very place that is shunned by the residents of the Settlement for its apparent evil. Interestingly enough, his transgression of the established margins of the Settlement results in a metamorphoses of sorts. He begins to acquire a new wardrobe that included jeans, flare pants, shirts with pleats and trousers that had to be belted above the waist (98). The inhabitants of the settlement, seeing this change in him have misgivings about its influence(98). Yet the changeover of the Indian subject here counters the farcical formulation of the mimic men in colonial narratives. There is a more sombre disposition in this mimicry. Its strangeness does cause displacement but the focus this time is not on the colonial onlooker but on the coolie community itself. The clothes distance him from his cultural context. It demonstrates one of the important ways in which the power of postcolonial narrativity affirmatively repositions the subaltern subject from periphery to centre. The intensity of communal disapproval is felt when he begins to question their beliefs, for in doing so he questions too the relevance of their identity: You should look at people more. Not at stone faces (102). They fear that such irreverence will invoke the wrath of Kaliamma, the very goddess whom they are intent on appeasing. The coolies are shown to be just as vehement as their colonial masters in drawing boundaries of self and Other. Pandians metamorphoses and subsequent transgression of the boundary markers of the settlement is not taken lightly. For many it is seen as a catastrophic act that could rob them of their precious motherland. The person most vocal about this is Arokian, the one initially chosen to kill the deer or pelanduk. His antagonism is driven by two significant events. Firstly, the

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women in the settlement are attracted by the material wealth that Pandian possesses. Secondly, Pandian insists on following him into the jungle on one of his journeys to locate the mythical deer. When they return, the rivalry is intensified as Pandian claims sole responsibility for the two wild boars that they bring back to the settlement. Arokian begins to see the characteristics of the deceptive golden deer of the Ramayana reflected in Pandians body, as he observed him change from day to day. He would flash by all silk and folds one evening, creases and coarseness the next(106). In many ways Arokian takes on the role of the guardian of his community. Like Lakshman told to guard Sita from the elusive magic of the deer, he feels compelled to guard his people from what he perceives are the gilded features of Pandian. The end of the story is thus not surprising. On the second venture into the jungle, Arokian returns without Pandian and when asked of his whereabouts, answers: I killed the pelanduk. Like Maricha it turned back into a man He was confused and afraid, like us(107). Unable to find the mythical deer in the jungle, Arokian perceives its likeness in Pandians changeable manner. In killing Pandian, Arokian believes that he has destroyed the very source that was threatening to annihilate the selfdom that the community has sought to protect all those years. By doing so he believes that he has solved the riddle of existence that Govindasamy spoke of earlier and that the community can finally emerge out of their dream-like state. Yet, the irony is that while it is true that the community has to discover the source of illusion, it lies not in the deer but rather in themselves. It is this dreamlike essence that needs to be destroyed in order for them to recognise the reality of their situation. They have to take vengeance upon the world that they created themselves, to exit the dream that they exist in. Yet, the residents are not prepared to leave the security of their utopian world. As Maniam himself asserts in the preface to the collection of stories of which The Pelanduk is part of, the self that asserts [only] itself is only comfortable in a narcissistically created world; the self that is open to all influences learns to view itself in a larger context(1996,xii). Like Narcissus, their attraction to this world will ultimately consume the self. The diasporic self must learn to migrate out of this selfdestructive utopia and embrace elements that are outside it. As R. Radhakrishnan puts it,
the diasporic self acquires a different historicity and a different sense of duration within its new location that is neither home nor not-home. Rather than glorify the immigrant moment as a mode of perennial liminality, the diasporic self seeks to reterritorialize itself and thereby acquire a name. (1996: 175)

The perennial liminality that he speaks of is akin to the initial state of isolation, of that condition of exclusivism in merely being a little (of) India. For being a term that refers to the threshold of consciousness (OED) or the borderline that

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one has to cross before full stimulus sets in (Chambers), liminality reflects a state of hovering or hesitating at the doorway of a new world. The reterritorialization of the self that Radhakrishnan posits as its counter-action and consequently, the new ethnic self that is named amalgamates the two worlds instead of being rooted in the state of in-between. The Indian coolie community must ultimately cross the liminality of their migrant condition and reterritorialise the culture-scape that lies beyond the doorway. The following chapter demonstrates the ways in which KS Maniam portrays the Indian coolie communitys capacity to achieve this through reterritorializing their Indian culture-scapes.

Notes
I do not mean to suggest here that Maniam is the only Malaysian Indian who writes about the community. There are other writers as well. However, he is the only one among them who focuses on the early coolie experience and thus fills in the gap between colonial discourse and postcolonial discourse of the Indian coolie. Marie Gerrina Louis has two novels, The Road to Chandibole (Singapore: Heinemann Asia,1994) and Junos (Singapore: Heinemann Asia,1995) that deal with the Indian experience in Malaysia. While the former is set in the 1940s, it does not delve as deeply into the coolie experience as Maniams works. The latter deals with a North Indian immigrant who sails to Singapore in the 1950s. This book however is concerned mainly with the South Indian migrant experience. Then, there is also Rani Manickas The Rice Mother (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 2002) which deals with the Ceylonese Indian community in Malaya. The Tamil coolies however are not included in the narrative space. Manicka herself is now a resident of the United Kingdom and not Malaysia. As such, it is Maniams works that I focus on for the postcolonial gaze of the coolie experience. 2 Tamil term for a laundryman. 3 An earlier version of this argument has appeared as Indo-Malaysians: Suspended Identities or Citizens of a New Selfdom In Diasporas: Theories, Histories, Texts Ed. Makarand Paranjape. (IndiaLog Publications: New Delhi 2001). 4 Kaliamma is the South Indian name for the Hindu Mother Goddess.
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CHAPTER FIVE TRANSFIGURATIVE DIASPORIC CONSCIOUSNESS

There is a tendency in a number of critical enquiries into Maniams works to focus on the notion of exile. While I do not dispute the fact that many of Maniams lead characters are inextricably caught up in the dilemma of belonging to the Malayan or Malaysian land, I do find the focus on angst and exile rather problematic. They seem rather intent on the failure of the Malaysian Indian diasporic imaginary. There is for instance Bernard Wilsons reading of Maniams portrayal of the Malaysian Indian experience as showing their (largely unsuccessful) attempts to negotiate a path towards hybrid identity that acknowledges their cultural and religious heritage (2003: 392) and that selfidentity and self-worth become more and more difficult to create(399) for this particular community. Likewise, Peter Wicks believes that beyond the personal landscapes of the individual, the prospects of south Indian diaspora are indeed bleak. Maniams fiction conveys a profound, haunted sense of cultural loss, and of never having arrived at a secular alternative. For too many Indian Malaysians, diaspora is both inescapable and acutely problematic (2002: 126). Such convictions, I argue, serve only to repeat the image of the ineffective coolie experience that already saturates national memory and ultimately dismiss the inventiveness of the diasporic imaginary that has reterritorialised Indian culture-scapes into Malaysian contexts. The cultural motifs that exist in his works do not turn in merely upon their Indian world, nor do they point to futility of diasporic existence of the Indian community of Malaysia. Instead their narrative presence points to the transfigurative power of diasporic consciousness. This becomes more clearly evident when seen in relation to the narrative presence of three important motifs that I consider as important signifiers of the transfigurative power of diasporic consciousness. The first is the figure of Lord Nataraja the Cosmic Dancer, the second is the Indian caballalike artform of the kolam and the third motif is the South Indian architectural form of the thinnai or verandah. I juxtaposition these with Radhakrishnans concept of reterritorialization. The figure of Lord Nataraja, an aspect of Lord Shiva, one of the Hindu trinity of Gods, constantly appears in many of Maniams works. His leading characters are repeatedly shown to be greatly drawn to this deitys spiritual energy, for he

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is the Cosmic Dancer. To me, this spiritual icon, associated with cosmic rhythm, movement and renewal, echoes the fundamental nature of the whole process of migration and its creation of the sequence of diaspora. The name of Natarajas most famous dance, the ananda tandava, according to Kamil Zlevebil, is identical with the Tamil word tantavam which means leaping, jumping (derived from the root tantu, to jump, leap across, jump over, dance) (1985: 2). As the majority of the Indian immigrants to Malaya were of Tamil descent, I believe that this etymology of Natarajas dance is highly relevant to their movement from one cosmos to another. It is said that when Nataraja dances, it is both a dance of destruction and of regeneration. The movement of the Indian individuals from India to Malaya was notably made up of a similar choreography. They moved from destructive forces in a familiar motherland to anticipated regeneration in the land that was to be adopted, Malaya. With this move, physical links to the motherland that nurtured their culture were destroyed. The more they struggled to keep this disintegration at bay by desperately clinging to this disappearing pathway, the more they stayed within the spaces of a liminal world that was neither here (in Malaya) nor there (in India). Instead of merely focusing on the destructive notions of immigrant existence, Maniam shows that there were a number of them who were intent on re-orchestrating the liminal spaces of subaltern identity. This resulted in a diasporic imaginary that reterritorialised the disintegrating communal self and set it to a new raga or rhythm of Indian identity. This new rhythm, I suggest, correlates in many ways to Lord Natarajas famous dance, the ananda tandava. When the South Indian immigrants moved from the homeland to the adopted land, they progressed within the wheels of the cycle of destruction and regeneration that characterises Lord Natarajas ananda tandava. The whirlwinds of poverty in nineteenth century India may have destroyed their livelihood, yet it propelled them towards a movement that promised deliverance from such a fate. It led to the creation of a diasporic identity in a new land, where the uprooted culture of India was regenerated by a new rhythm. When they migrated, they held within their hands the seeds of both destruction and creation, for while one hand destroyed the physical link with the motherland, the other was actively engaged in creating a new link to that land as they proceeded to regenerate vestiges of its legacy in the new country. The choreography created was in many ways reflective of the steps of the ananda tandava of Lord Nataraja. The following explanations by Ananda Coomaraswamy and Kamil Zlevebil, two renowned scholars of the iconography of this dance of Shiva, will help shed light on this discourse of the cosmic dance that I put forth. In Coomaraswamys essay, we are given the details of the dancing deity. He explains that most images of Lord Siva Nataraja in the dancing pose show him

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Chapter Five having four hands, with braided and jewelled hair of which the lower locks are whirling in the dance. In his hair may be seen a wreathing cobra, a skull and the mermaid figure of Ganga; upon it rests the crescent moon, and it is crowned with a wreath of Cassia leaves. In his right ear He wears a mans earring, a womans in the left; He is adorned with necklaces and armlets, a jewelled belt, anklets, bracelets, finger and toe-rings He wears also a fluttering scarf and a sacred thread. One right hand holds a drum, the other is uplifted in the sign do not fear;

one left hand holds fire, the other points down upon the demon Muyalaka, a dwarf holding a cobra; the left foot is raised. There is a lotus
pedestal from which springs an encircling glory (tiruvasi), fringed with flame, and touched within by the hands holding the drum and fire. (1975: 58)

Every detail of the dance highlighted above contains its own symbolic meaning within the cosmogony of Hindu thought. For the purpose of my discourse of the dance in relation to the constitution and consequent reproduction of the diasporic features of Malaysian Indian identity however, I look specifically at the symbolism of the four hands of the Cosmic Dancer, the circle of flame within the dances, the drum that he holds, the foot that is raised and the dwarf that he tramples upon. The minute details of these symbolic connotations are comprehensively drawn out in Kamil Zlevebils monograph on the iconography of the ananda tandava. He writes that according to RJ Mehta, the drum that is held in Lord Natarajas upper right hand, called the damaru or utukkai in Tamil and uduka in Telegu, represents the primary creative force and the intervals of the time process. Zlevebil goes on to explain that it is especially significant for its connection with the rhythm of the cosmos. Additionally, its form of two triangular drums joined in the middle, he says symbolises the unity between male and female principles. The other right hand uplifted in what is said to be the gesture fear not symbolises in turn the preservation, the duration, the maintenance of the universe. The fire that is held in the upper left hand stands for samhara, the destruction of the universe. Zlevebil stresses that the two upper hands symbolize thus the balance of creation and destruction. The left front arm stretched across the body is indicative of power and strength. The right foot tramples the dwarf Muyalaka or the demon of forgetfulness, symbolising the destruction of ignorance, while the left foot is raised in symbolism of the release of consciousness. The dance, Zlevebil concludes, enacts the eternal cycle of creation, protection, destruction and deliverance (1985: 35-41). My ensuing exploration of excerpts from a selection of Maniams works will demonstrate how these various aspects of the dance are ultimately reflected in the narrative thread. I begin with the short narrative Ratnamuni which opens with the following words:

Transfigurative Diasporic Consciousness Repot-kepot ayah. I cannot tell straight. This Bedong I stay all my life I did not come straight. When I was coming here nothing. Only her the uduku. That man in Madras wearing the uniform asks me, What is this, man? Everybody carrying big boxes and things, you only a beggars bundle? I said, The Lord Siva danced and made the world. (1994: 1)

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The speaker is an Indian immigrant, Muniandy, about to embark on the journey to Malaya. Once again, Maniam places the migrant Indian coolie as the narrating subject. Here previous subaltern markings are transfigured by the subjects allusion to mythological figures. The parallel with Lord Nataraja hints at Muniandys hope of creating a new terrain in the land that he has chosen to move to. The story enacts the trials and tribulations that he undergoes as he attempts to transplant an uprooted culture in the new land. His aspiration to dance like Lord Siva in the new land can be seen as one that follows the sequence (and the attendant symbolism) of the deitys ananda tandava. Also, Muniandy likens himself to Hanuman, the Simian featured god of the epic Ramayana. He speaks of his first employment in the new land as a boat-rower carrying the men, women, children- strangers from one bank to the other bank in a gliding boat. The light making lines on the water. The people going from one darkness to another darkness. I am Hanuman the rowing monkey for them(1). Here there is the notion of the taboo of crossing of the dark waters, that symbolic act that was to wash away all traces of caste and subsequently all connection with the ancestral land. Yet, Muniandy re-invents his role by placing himself at the centre of this journey as a spiritual guide, just like Govindasamy in The Pelanduk. This role is largely tied to his only possession, the uduku, that very drum that Lord Siva holds in his hands as he dances. The drum, we know, is connected to the rhythm of the cosmos. Maniam, speaking of the uduku in a separate article, explains that it is capable, when played by a person in a state of ritual purity, of sending the player into trance and so reveal knowledge that is otherwise not usually available (1987: 220). In the story, Muniandy appears to have such visionary powers. Whenever he plays the uduku, he advances into this trancelike state and elicits information of an ethereal kind, guiding the residents to the spirit that haunted the local mango tree and the tar doll with needles planted at the back of the dhobis house. He achieves almost epic stature of his own in the community: My name is going all over the town, across the railway lines(34). The subaltern figure has thus managed to re-invent himself, exhibiting too the liberatory power of Maniams postcolonial re-articulation of subaltern history. However, that very history, as we know, was not without its problems and the story presents the harsher realities of life in the colonial plantation. We are presented with the suicide of Muniandys wife, which in turn leads him to

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escape his predicament by turning to the destructive power of toddy. His life does indeed follow the sequence of Lord Sivas dance. It is after all as much creative as it is destructive. However this time the conviction he had at the very beginning is lost: When at last I think I have reached I must start again I wont start again, I want to go back to the water. To be a line in the river that dances and is broken. I want to break and heal without knowing. I drink toddy in the evening(7). Through such self-imposed oblivion, he transgresses from the cosmic dancer to the dwarf of ignorance that is trampled in the sequence of the dance itself. He becomes a comical figure, the big monkey dancer that children began to make fun of (8), instead of the revered Hanuman alluded to earlier. Yet the sequence of ignorance does not last long. In what is now a signature technique of Maniams creative interpolation, cultural thought is transferred onto the body of narrative personas. Muniandy realises that he has been charmed by mayam or illusion and that this has kept him from the true knowledge of his wifes suicide: I am also part of the dance knowing I am only a dancer. I have to create so I can be destroyed to enter a greater creation(13). Like Siva Nataraja, he must trample the dwarf of ignorance to release a higher consciousness of his identity in the new country. He becomes, symbolically, the uduku that he owns My skin is ready to be drummed on(17). I would suggest here too that the notion of coolies emaciated by the destructive influence of toddy in the colonial plantations is here conveyed through another angle1. This coolie does not waste away. He reinvents himself through a cultural emblem. Consequently, the truth behind his wifes suicide is revealed. He discovers that she was raped by their neighbour, Muthiah. This revelation tramples in turn, his ignorance of the actual predicament of his wife, being one of the few Indian women in a male dominated estate: When my wife bent over me in the mornings I didnt listen to her words. The voice charmed a mayam over my ears. I was too happy to see the custom from the Big Country still used in my house. Now the suffering didnt come behind the truth. All the saying that had gone past a deaf ear were heard again. There was pain and contempt in them(17). His overwhelming sense of pride in the fact that he was successful in recreating the customs of the motherland in his new world almost destroys what is more important, the institution of the family and its creation of another generation of the Indian diaspora of Malay(si)a. For when Muniandy turns to the temporary solace brought by the consumption of toddy, he forgets all responsibilities as father to his growing son. It is only when he realises the true force behind the uduku and all it symbolises that he achieves a higher consciousness. He becomes more aware of the equality between men and women. The drum is after all shaped to symbolise the harmony between the genders. Significantly too, Siva and his

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female consort, Sakti, are worshipped in the half male/half female form of the Ardhanaiswara. Maniam has himself argued elsewhere that the feminine perception or sympathetic awareness allows for a more complete response to the purpose of man (1987: 222). I would suggest too that the weight of iconographic symbolism that is present in the narrative space is shared out among both the lead male and female central characters of the story. Muniandy is Siva to his goddess wife (3) and when he becomes aware of the importance of her role in his life, he is regenerated from the wounds of destruction. The story thus does reflect in many ways the sequence and attendant symbolism of Natarajas ananda tandava and the way its rhythm is creatively transfigured by the diasporic imaginary. Likewise, the narrative pattern of the novel The Return mirrors the sequential rhythms of this cosmic dance. The same deity occupies a central role in the life of Periathai, the influential grand matriarch already encountered previously. The statue of Lord Nataraja is among one of her most precious possessions. The following passage demonstrates its significance as a core element in her reconstruction of the ancestral world that has been left behind in the act of migration. As her grandson Ravi remembers:
Periathai opened one of the two tin trunks she had brought from India. Handling every object gently, she took out a statue of Nataraja, the cosmic dancer ringed by a circle of flame, a copper tray, a hand-woven silver-and-gold sari, bangles and a thali. These were laid out, Nataraja raised in the centre, on an earthen dais on the wall niche. Then she drew forth bronze lamps and pouring oil from a clay container, she set them, three in number, alight. The sari, the jewellery and the idol glowed now, creating a kind of eternity around them. Periathai sat cross legged, hair wet and in unadorned clothes before the holy niche and entered into a deep contemplation. Perhaps Nataraja spoke to her of the original spirit, and her personal articles of the home she had left behind. It was a re-immersion, a recreating of the thick spiritual and domestic air she must have breathed there, back in some remote district of India. (1993: 5-6)

Periathais communion with the Lord of the Dance reflects the idea of the creative powers of the transplanted Indian immigrants as they reconstructed an Indian landscape in a new land. Periathai, however, is not merely satisfied with reconstructions in the mind. She has her own house built according to the architectural style of South Indian houses, with a thinnai or raised cement verandah common to houses in South India, a large cool hall, an Indian cooking place and an entrance of pillars depicting scenes from the Ramayana and the villages of India (4). These are all indicative of her desire to recreate familiar settings from the relinquished homeland, assurances that all was not destroyed in the journey across the seas. Maniam himself sees her in the light of

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a dancer, for he writes while the Cosmic Dancer is the masculine, here the dancer is feminine (1987: 222). To fully orchestrate her own sequence in the new land, Periathai aspires to own the land that she has built the house on, on the grounds that she had occupied that bit of land long enough to be its rightful heir(9). However, because she does not possess any written deed to the land but only a vague belief and a dubious loyalty (8), she is not successful in gaining ownership rights and is served instead with a notice of eviction by the local land council. Her dance, it appears, has been halted mid-way. If the diasporic Indian identity cannot be housed in the new land, then the narrative of the overseas Indian selfdom seems in danger of occupying only borrowed space. The failure is allegorically transferred onto her body. The lump that she has always had on her shoulder develops into a malignant tumour. It symbolises the burden of communal identity that she is unable to set down into the ground of the new land. News of her terminal illness gains her only a temporary tenure from the council. The interruption in the rhythm of diasporic acclimatization in the new land is also transferred onto the figure of Periathais beloved cosmic deity. When she takes out the tin trunks after this failure and kneels before Nataraja, even he glowed dully. The light that fell from the tier lamps didnt throw the tin trunk, mats, lamps and hand-cart into solid relief as it had on Periathais ritual Fridays(10). However, her spirit does not give up on the land. As she vows to her grandson My many spirits roam it When I die Ill never stop haunting the place(8). Periathais spirit does indeed haunt the land after her death, in the form of the diasporic Indian hope for affiliation to the land that has been adopted. She may have died homeless but her spirit houses itself in her son, Kannan, the narrators father:
the spirit that had touched Periathai now possessed my father. He continued the battle that Periathai had begun: to drive some stake in the country. The restlessness that had motivated Periathai into building her houses and keeping the kolam courtyard decorated, meaningful, and intact, took another form in my father. (140)

Kannan keeps Periathais dance of diaspora alive, but he also invests in it rhythms that are his own. He fights to own the land that the family house stands on. Sadly, his attempts, like his mothers before him, are met with failure. Yet the indomitable spirit that moved Periathai moves Kannan also. When one of his sons dies in a road accident, he buries him in a corner of the land that the house stands on, instead of in a graveyard as the community expects him to. The act is indicative of Kannans attempt to embed a part of him in the land, to sink the pillars of his house into the clay.

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In giving to the land, he later relinquishes some links with the ancestral land, India. He discards the tin trunks that were brought on their journey to the new land but he retains the statue of Nataraja. The difference here though is that while Periathai offerings to the deity were the cultural items that she had brought with her from India, Kannans offerings to Lord Nataraja are items from the adopted land:
He always brought back [from the fields] a load of objects to the shrine room. A tree trunk, swathes of lallang, clumps of grass, bank clay shaped into a hut, were presented to Nataraja . (170)

Those items, taken from the soil of the adopted country, indicate his hope that he will own the land that his mothers house stands on, and by virtue of ownership, achieve a sense of belonging. Distressed by the town councils unyielding order for him to vacate the land, he puts away Periathais lamps and ritual vessels, asserting that they are useless, fashioning instead his own urns, lamps, jars, and statues with many arms and faces, out of the clay he brought from the river(171). Again, they are indicative of his need to belong to the land and the transfiguration of the Indian sensibility as it interlaces with the new homeland. However, because he is still refused the rights of ownership to the land, he creates a rite of passage of his own by cremating himself alive inside the house. Admittedly, this act is extreme and many critics have read it as the ultimate failure of the disenfranchised diasporic to gain any form of admission into the Malaysian national landscape. However, I suggest a counter argument to this tragic act. If we are to read this last act of Kannan against the allegorical framework of the ananda tandava, then it is possible to see a symbolic subtext. Natarajas ananda tandava, as Coomaraswamy informs us, is performed in the crematorium, the burning ground" which symbolises the place where the ego is destroyedresulting in a state where illusion and deeds are burnt away (1975: 61). Images of the deity show him always surrounded by a ring of fire. The house becomes the crematorium that burns away the illusion of physical ownership. It is thus extremely significant that the statue of Nataraja survives the fire. The idol is not damaged, only darker and fallen on his side(173). I thus argue that Kannans death is not, as most critics would have it, a tragic signifier of diasporic hysteria but can be seen instead as the act that burns away the illusion that has thus far blinded his son Ravi, the narrator of the novel. It is through Ravis psyche that the story is filtered to us. As such it is his mindfulness of the importance of Lord Nataraja to both his grandmother and his father that places the deity at the centre of the novels symbolic discourse. This awareness however descends on him only after Kannans death for he initially

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dismisses that diasporic desire to belong to the land that drove both Periathai and Kannan:
I stood outside Periathai and Kannans preoccupations. ... I had, watching Periathais failure to earn a home in this land, decided to acquire a skill that would allow me a comfortable, unthreatened existence. (140)

As a child, he demarcates a portion of the house as his imaginary room, creating a space where an imperturbable insulation cut off the happenings in the other parts of the house (38). He immerses himself in the pursuit of education and is relieved when he wins a teacher training scholarship to England. This individualistic impulse dwarfs the effort of his elders to reterritorialise the liminal spaces of a leased identity into a more complete sense of ownership. Their struggle to ground themselves firmly in the soil of their new homeland has gone by largely ignored by Ravi. However this changes when he returns from England and is informed of his fathers death. I suggest that as Ravi stands at the ground of the self-imposed cremation of his father, the cloak of illusion is finally lifted. In confronting the ashes of his past, ignorance is eradicated and knowledge or awareness is born, just as in Natarajas ananda tandava, where the left foot tramples the dwarf of forgetfulness while the right is raised in demonstration of the release of consciousness. As Ravi asserts at the end, I had not walked away from Naina, or Periathai, for they were still vividly in my mind(172). This birth of knowledge consequently shapes itself into the narrative that we read as well as the poem that he places at the end as a requiem to his ancestors. The novel thus presents the sequence of diaspora in the lives of his family, and the different rhythms that are produced in its composition. In demonstrating the links that are created and destroyed as new generations of the Indian diaspora in Malaysia emerge, this creative text ultimately becomes the ananda tandava of the imagination. With every turn in its narrative plot, it records the changing choreography of Indian identity as ancestral original culture is reterritorialised with new ragas from the adopted land. Like Nataraja dancing, scattering white ash to form the lines of a master plan to shape the world (Zlevebil 1985: 42), the transplanted Indian individuals, I suggest, shaped a pattern of their own, which is in many senses the blueprint of the design of the diasporic identity that Malaysian Indians hold today. By allegorically interpolating the figure of Nataraja into the narrative sequence of Maniams works, I choose to focus on the capacity for transfiguration in the coolie figure of the past rather than magnifying their failure to achieve a sense of belonging, as many critics tend to do. This is further reinforced in my following discourse on the Indian art form of the kolam and its correlation with the Malaysian Indian diasporic imaginary.

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The kolam is a traditional South Indian art form that normally graces the entrance of Indian houses. It is a cabbala-like design that begins with a sequence of dots drawn on the ground and these consequently develop to form a series of uninterrupted lines. It is an important cultural symbol that is specifically placed at the entrance of the house with the belief that it will invite harmony within the home that lies past its bordered edges. To me, this stands as a significant allegory for the diasporic rites of passage into the new home-land whereby the spaces of migrant liminality are transgressed with the hope of a harmonious dwelling inside their new location. Notably, in Maniams narratives, we encounter a host of characters for whom owning a home is anything but a peaceful affair. The twists and turns that are formed on the grounds of these hopes are like so many kolams sketched out in anticipation of harmony as they proceed deeper into the land that has now become home. The only difference, however, is that these designs do not emerge out of a single uninterrupted line, like the original South Indian kolam. The emplotment of the narrative of diaspora is one that has been disrupted not only by the act of migration, which has already interrupted an identity previously grounded in a familiar motherland. It is also broken up by a series of other lines. On the one hand, there are those new lines created by the intervention of imperial discursive domination that has for so long been taken as a true reflection of their (Othered) world. Then there is also the emergence of other lines that are created when the adopted land interweaves itself into the interstitial spaces created by the very act of migration. Migrant or diasporic consciousness can never surface out of a series of clear, unbroken lines of historicity. I suggest to, that on another level, this allegory of the kolam is applicable to the portrait of the writers imagination itself. Though Maniam writes mainly of the Malaysian Indian community, the borders of his imagination, if we follow its trails closely, do not taper inwards into that ethnic community alone. Instead, at every juncture, they edge out of the perimeters of that communal world into the territory peopled by the other communities sharing that same soil. The ethnic self may be named in that journey of selfdiscovery, it may also be predominantly Indian in culture, yet it does not hover hesitantly at the liminal edges of the compound of nationhood. The kolam that arises out of his imagination, though Indian in origin, transgresses the boundaries of that identity and ventures into a territory that brings it into contact with the multi-cultural elements that reside in its midst. Through such an interaction, it yields to a reproduction of its ancestral form. These elements contribute to the consequent reterritorialisation of the Indian self as borders are broken down and new imprints are allowed to pattern the fabric of this new identity. This is in line with what Ien Ang calls the multiperspectival productivity that fills up the space that gets lost in the

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cultural translation from one side of the border to the other with new forms of culture at the collision/collusion of the two: hybrid cultural forms borne out of a productive, creative syncretism (1993: 7). In the continuing discussion of Maniams works, I use the allegory of the transfigured kolam to show the ways in which Indian consciousness is reproduced in a diasporic form when it collides with and consequently merges with elements of the Malay(si)an land2. The novel In a Far Country best reflects the polemics of this discourse that I posit. Rajans main preoccupation is, like all those encountered above, to create a harmonious abode within the country that his ancestors had migrated to and which he now calls home. Faced with the impending dystopia that looms around the corners of his communal world that seems to be perennially stationed on the liminal spaces of its invisible axis of enchantment, Rajan feels impelled to transgress its limiting boundaries. The plot of the novel is itself a transgression of boundaries of the mind. It is a chronicle of a self-interrogating journey which takes him deep into the terrains of a past where he recalls various characters from all walks of life and ethnic divisions. Like him they are all bound by a common quest for a home. The dialogues that are recast into the present through such memories of the past, when collated, can be seen to culminate in the shape of a kolam that, like its artiste, does not loop in upon its Indian centre but rather unfurls towards other territories. As Rajan collides with those other characters, each add to the pattern their own experiences. These ultimately fuse into a multicultural composition. In his introduction to the collection of short stories, Haunting the Tiger, Maniam writes that the counter reality that emerges from these stories includes and builds on the borderland between cultures found in the country. This is the region where there are cultural cross-overs. These create in turn an interface between the various cultures (xi). The quest of Rajan and the counter reality that emerges from his re-collections build these very borderlands. I suggest that as they cross over, they shape a kolam that becomes more Malaysian than it is solely Indian in design. Notably though, the very first grain that is placed on the floor of his imagination is that of his father, the old man we encountered in the previous section. The novel takes off with Rajans memories of his father and the sense of despair that he seems to have inherited. The grains of this ancestral memory bring into the narrative space particles of the failed expectations of a disillusioned migrant community. It is this legacy that Rajan has inherited and which he carries with him as he moves outward, taking with him the lacerated body of early diasporic Indian consciousness of Malaya. However, as the thoughts of his father are gathered in the present, it notably puts into motion the arrival of the subaltern into published history. For instance, in the passage below, the gaze of the subaltern figure of the past is juxtapositioned with that of his imperial master:

Transfigurative Diasporic Consciousness My fathers red and bleary eyes revealed the discontent that overpowered him at the end of his life. Why had he given up? Didnt the temple and the toddy shop satisfy him? The first Englishman who thought of tall, swaying trees that produced the toddy and temple tucked away in a remote corner on the estate, must have seen pastoral existence without cynicism. My fathers puffy cheeks and premature grey hair traced the history of cynicism which soured the very centre of that tropical paradise: nira, the manna from the skies and the gods chariot stored away in a dusty, dilapidated nook of the temple! (42)

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What we have here is the collision of two visions. The cynicism that Rajan remembers as reflected in his fathers eyes works not only to reveal the subaltern coolies consciousness of his subjugated existence but more importantly contradicts the imperial vision that saw only a benevolent pastoral existence for his subjects of rule. Rajans re-membering of his family history adds new lines to the design of imperial discursivity. As the pattern develops, we learn that the nira that the migrants prayed for with every trip to the temple was seldom placed in their hands. The plantation realm was, as we know, far from bearing any resemblance to a tropical paradise. It was a regimented setting. Yet, that cynical gaze of Rajans father never turned in solely upon that manmade world but was constantly aware of the existence of life beyond its limiting boundaries:
We must leave the estate. We must go the real land." That was what he said the many times we stood at the estate border and looked at the sprawling, hilly land beyond. "We must get to the centre" he said, all by ourselves". (44)

By this, Maniam demonstrates that there were individuals amongst the coolie community who chose to see a different path from that which they were placed in. Just as the coolie voices and actions disturbed the order of the plantation in the colonial narratives, here the subaltern disrupts the colonialists selffashioned idyllic vision by interpolating his own vision of the Malayan land. The influence of such insurgent consciousness is seen in his son, for Rajan works to transmute the margins that skirt the fortress-like world of the rubber plantation. However, this being said, the Indian foundation of that world is not effaced in the transgression but is rather drawn into the new design that materialises. Before the lines can move out to interface with the cultures that coexist in the world outside the plantation, the migrant Indian experience is first plotted out, with all its failed dreams and its extremely enchanting yet equally limiting defence mechanism of the cherished India of the imagination. They are grains that form a significant part of his communal heritage as they name Rajans ethnic self. As such they need to be recorded. In this sense, his father, disillusioned with the world that he flew blindly into, might have felt it to be

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insignificant like the handfuls of dirt that fall into the ocean, yet that very ocean is none other than the sea of history that washes over his sons mind. When Rajan reaches deep into its bed, the handful of sand that he clutches in his hands are dropped onto a new terrain and they form the initial patterns of his kolam. The narration that continues constantly drifts back towards this cradle, while simultaneously circling out towards other sources of nourishment. It is in the former that one apprehends the cultural cross-overs, etched on the surface of the imagination. The first progression that transmutes the Malaysian Indian boundary lines leads to Lee Shin, a Malaysian Chinese. Rajan feels linked to Lee Shin by a common deep-seated desire for a home (28). Both are inheritors of the cultural consciousness of the diasporic experience, that which comes from a disassociated history. Lee Shin struggles to join the frayed threads of his lineage with furniture imported from his original motherland and also by possessing an imported flute, which Rajan conceives as not of this country. Lee Shins words endorse this: Such bamboo instrumentsif made out of local materials, would only have a fragility and shortness that come from unrootedness and shallow skills (39). Lee Shin could be said to represent a Chinese flute that is made out of local materials, born as he is in Malaysia. Failing to destroy time and its many disturbances with a soothing melody, he is, however, finally unhinged by his own parochialism. I am reminded here of Muniandy and his uduku of the story Ratnamuni, though the transference of the allegory of the musical instrument onto the latters body proves to be more absorbing of the Malayan encounter than it is with Lee Shin. Perhaps this is because with Lee Shin, there is only a retreat into ancestral consciousness and not much of an attempt to transfigure it with elements from the new land. Rajan remembers that Lee Shin died with the death of a dream in his hands. Initially, Rajan is influenced by the disillusionment that seems to surround him. He is reminded too of his fathers disenchantment at the end of his life and decides to move away from the perimeters of such ill- fated aspirations towards a land that does not seem to be able to embrace its diasporic newcomers. He looks for a more assertive way in which he can negotiate such ties and finds it in the world of land brokerage: I had finally freed myself from the phase in history that had trapped and killed my father and his generation (66). There is a sense of empowerment in taking charge of the land that had turned its back on his forebears in a way that did not involve him too much:
Those remaining years in the town were creative and prosperous. My land aesthetics grew. There was no need, I realized, to get too involved with the land. That only led to despair and futility. The other approach was the saner one: it led to a clean, knowledgeable way of living. Soon the land came to reside within me as some material that could be shaped into whatever it had use for. This kind of land I didnt even bother about, even in my dreams. (77-78)

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It appears as if he has found a way out of the clutches of the legacy of failure that he feels he has inherited from his father (and the larger community). It does seem too that the kolam that is created in the process is almost complete and ready to be placed in front of his home. Yet, it as at that crucial moment that he meets two important individuals. The first is Sivasurian, another Malaysian Indian who, like Rajan and all Indo-Malaysians, comes from the world of a culture transferred onto another land. The second is Zulkifli, a Malay man, whose lineage is secured to an indigenous affiliation to that same land. Sivasurians narrative role is significantly tied to the symbolism that lies behind his name, as Siva is the Lord of the Universe and Surian the Sun God. Both represent knowledge and light3. He leads Rajan out of his own selfimposed boundaries, urging him to to go back so that youll know what you are (89). He also leaves him a written legacy in the form of a book which chronicles the process of the diasporic naming of its new ethnic self as an Indian of Malaya rather than an Indian merely in Malaya. The catalyst for this, as Sivasurian writes in his narrative, is the Rubber Depression and the colonial governments decision to repatriate Indians back to their original land:
The people who ruled the country saw them as a burden that must be removed. So the song of the motherland was sung and dry faces made wet with tears. Desperation was piled upon desperation until there was no reason left. ... soon they the discontented, took up the cry let us go home Our mother there will feed us, clothe us, give us back our dignity. (105)

Yet, Sivasurian looks at those who took up these tickets to return as those who were in doubt of themselves and the land(105). There were many, like him, who saw fit to reject further imperial domination of their lives. For those who chose to stay on were those who looked at themselves as if they were born again They didnt know of anywhere else. They were in that land that had been chosen for them(106). These were the individuals who sought to transgress the liminal spaces of the migrant condition and reterritorialise their Indian identity. Colonial design was thus rejected and replaced with a more self-assertive process of renaming. Sivasurians book comes to occupy an important place on the floor of Rajans imagination, for it patterns out the left-over dream of the Indian diaspora, people who were determined to stay in the country that was their host. It is thus significant too that the whole body of his text is presented in bold font within the narrative space. Equally noteworthy is the fact that Sivasurians narrative vision does not loop inwards to its own ethnic world but looks to ways ethnic consciousness could be transfigured by a conviction of Malayan brotherhood. He recounts though how all this changed after the Japanese occupation of Malaya and, in his figurative language, how each man

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wanted a country of people behind him. Before there was only one country. Now there were many countries inside that one country(116). People began to be more concerned with the nomenclature of ethnic compartments. Interestingly though, it is at that point that the book makes its exit from the narrative space. The ellipsis that marks its departure is rather symbolic, for Sivasurians thoughts seem to now merge with Rajans consciousness:
Sivasurians writing doesnt come to an end there. I suddenly realise Ive to go on a journey. I recall his words: Youve to go back the way you came so you can know here you are. I dont know where I am but I can sense that the road Ive travelled so far is paved with blindness. (118)

The text becomes yet another line that is etched onto the surface of the unfurling kolam. It results in a re-territorialisation of the liminal spaces of Rajans world. It is this revelation4 that moves him towards Zulkifli, a son of the soil that had played host to his community for many centuries. Rajan has to bring Zulkifli and his worldview into the design of his kolam. Zulkifli enters Rajans life almost the same time as Sivasurian. He too speaks of a merging of boundaries and more significantly, questions Rajans relationship with the land: you dont know the real land (81). Yet at that point in the novel, Sivasurian takes precedence. I suggest that this is symbolic of the initial outlining of Rajans passage out of his ethnic base. However, when his consciousness is transfigured by Sivasurians discourse, Rajan realises that the rites of passage are not yet complete: the borders of my consciousness are still not sufficiently destroyed for me to know the heart of my country. I lie here on my bed, not thinking. Ive given up resistance. It was resistance that had prevented me from entering the depths of tiger-land that Zulkifli had promised me (136-137). What proceeds next is a journey of the minds eye into the hinterland that finally removes the sentry from the outpost of his imagination. The ultimate test is, in the words of Zulkifli, to moult completely, to leave everything that makes up the self to embrace the mystical tiger, symbol of the quality of Malay life and the Malay vision of the world (Dr. Watson, afterword). Yet Rajan cannot fully accept the tiger: Something else intervenes: the flesh melting away into something unrecognizable. I turn back. The idea that nothing of me will ever remain appalls me (143). Merging would mean expelling his past, and he is too much a part of it, of his fathers dreams and the diasporic experience that has moulded him. It is enough that he is willing to meet with it and to give it a place on the figure of his imagination. It is this final act that renders the borders of his imagination malleable: Now that the mind has no sieve-like barrier erected around it all kinds of images and occurrences pass easily into its territory (145). Intertwined upon the surface of his imagination these images

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become the grains that outline the diasporic Indian experience of Malaysia, both colonial and postcolonial. This transgressive cultural terrain is, in form, the kolam of Rajans diasporic imaginary. Placed on the reclaimed ground of subalternity, this reterriorialised cultural icon, like its ancestral predecessor, invites harmony within this far country while it interlaces the cultures that reside within its home. The overarching theme of Maniams works of fiction from the discussion heretofore is notably located within the polemics of home and belonging. It follows thus that at the heart of this discourse one often finds the attendant referent of residence, the physical house itself. This brings me to the third motif of my discourse of the identity of the diasporic Indian in Malaysia, that of the South Indian architectural feature of the thinnai or verandah. It is one of the distinguishing features of traditional Tamil houses. In the novel The Return, Periathais house is described as having a thinnai in its midst. Similiarly, in his third novel, Between Lives, which forms the background of the ensuing discussion, this same architectural feature is mentioned. The thinnai is, in form, the exterior space of the house that lies between the thalvaram or street corridor consisting of a raised sheltered platform and the interior of the house. It is often referred to as a semi-public verandah, as the resident family would often use it to entertain guests not very familiar to them (Mayooranathan 2002). Gopal Dalmia succinctly refers to it as the area that marks the sensitive transit space after which one enters the house through a finely carved wooden door (2000). It lies in between public and private space. The thinnai thus can be seen as the transgressive space between the inner and the outer world. It is the place where inhabitants from the former interact with the latter and if they are more familiar, they transgress into the space of the home that lies within. Interestingly enough, Bill Ashcroft has argued on this very same idea of transculturation and the significance of the veranda to postcolonial identity:
the veranda can be seen as the defining metonym of transculturation. Verandas are the very model of the contact zone where inhabitants and strangers may meet with ease. They are the space in which inside and outside interact, and not only do they reveal the provisionality of such apparently unnegotiable boundaries but they represent that space in which the inner and outer may change and affect one another. Metaphorically speaking verandas become that space in which discourse itself is disrupted and the very identities of the inner and outer become negotiable. (Ashcroft 2001: 195)

Note the confluence with Gopals idea of the transit space. Using the metaphor of the thinnai as the backdrop to this concluding section of this chapter, I show the ways in which it becomes the site for the transculturation of the discourse

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between characters of different generations of the Indian diaspora in Maniams fiction. Its significance as a South Indian architectural feature of the home makes it a pertinent metaphorical signifier of intergenerational negotiations of the legacy of South Indian identity in Malaysia. It becomes the portal of folk memory, the space where the younger generation of the diasporic community is drawn into, and subsequently transformed by, the memories of the older generation. In The Return, the thinnai is depicted as the space where the grandchildren wait in anticipation for the spiritual immersion of Periathais pujas to Lord Nataraja that would take place inside the house. It becomes the transit space to the altar of ancestral re-collection. It is also the space upon which this revered elder of the community recounts to them the numerous episodes from the Ramayana. They sit facing the kolam-covered frontyard, enthralled by the whole experience: Her voice transformed the kolams into contours of reality and fantasy, excitingly balanced. I felt I stood on the edge of a world I may have known (6). By their presence at these moments of spiritual and legendary immersion, these children, second generation diasporic Indians, are drawn into and consequently witness in many senses, the world that may have been theirs had the moment of migration not come to pass. Their sense of the present is altered by glimpses of an ancestral past. The thinnai thus becomes the middle passage-way upon which they transgress the border that lies between these two worlds. The ensuing argument builds substantially on this idea as I look at Maniams third novel, Between Lives. The novel vividly dramatizes the politics of Malaysian Indian identity through interspersing the lives of two women who emerge from different corners of its historical backdrop: Sumitra, the product of a middle class Malaysian Indian background and Sellamma from the colonial plantation coolie background. The former has been given the task of persuading the latter to relinquish her hold on a piece of land that is keenly sought after by developers. However, what begins as an act to remove the old lady from her territory transforms instead into a journey of ancestral immersion. The property that Sellamma so steadfastly defends is not merely soil and mortar but rather the discarded terrain of communal history that needs reconnection with a largely dismissive new generation of middle class Malaysian Indians. For many, that status has its roots in the plantation world and this applies to Sumitra as well for both her parents, we learn later, emerged from those very grounds. In the course of the narration, Sumitras notion of the present is gradually transformed by a newer and more informed sense of the past through her numerous visits to Sellamas residence. Most of the encounters between the two women take place in and around the house that Sellamma has inherited from her family. Its design stands as a

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testimony of the transfiguration of the migrant sensibility. Built by Sellammas father, Arokian, it does not strictly follow the vernacular Tamil architecture but is instead an amalgamation of two worlds. He wanted a house that would fit the ways of life here [in Malaya](96), a house that would be more Malay in design. In his eyes, Malaya had already become his homeland. On the insistence of his wife however, he retains the signature Tamil feature of the thinnai: Whatever you do I want the thinnai. Her mother said, We cant shake away our memories(97). Her words encapsulate the events that unfold within its space. Sumitra is not able to shake away the memories of her communal past. The house becomes the site for the confrontation and consequent re-engagement with its forgotten body. The platform for this reconnection is the thinnai. It becomes the contact zone for the transculturation of barriers between what lies inside the house (of memory) and the stranger who stands at the verandah of this abode. In the beginning Sumitra resists this connection: I hardly pay any attention to what she is saying (2). Thus in her first visit, she does not enter the house. Sellamma rises from the doorway. She leads the way round to the back of the house(3) to the surrounding compound. When they return Sumitra goes straight to her car for it felt as if she had ceased to exist for the old woman (7). She is not yet ready for the experience of the contact zone of the thinnai which would eventually lead her past that doorway into the house. On her second visit, she sits for a while on the thinnai, making mental notes (10) of the surroundings. This time she is led into the house but she does not stay long as she refuses to allow herself to be drawn into Sellammas memories, steeling herself instead against the latters watchful gaze(13). The resistance keeps her rooted at the thinnai of communal memory, still in transit. Anthony King argues that one can draw parallels between terminologies used in debates on culture and identity with those used in the world of architectural discourse. Theorizations of culture and identity, he states,
could be operationalized and tested by studying certain aspects of the material world as they have been physically and spatially produced and expressed and that phrases used [] such as constructions of ethinicities, concrete cultural practises, or discussions about the erosion or rebuilding of national identities, have an immediacy and physical referent which prompt me to start looking for their visual and spatial representations . (1991:149 emphasis in original)

My employment of the metaphor of the thinnai already engages with such parallels. Additionally, I argue that the narrative space of the novel itself becomes an integrative complex of the past and the present as well as different forms of discursivity, resulting from official and folk memory.

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Sumitras defence against the pull of Sellammas memories is to scour the official files that have been gathered over the years. This is interpolated into the narrative space, words that map out the old womans history. Yet like most official discourse on the subaltern, there are gaps in its formulation, as Sumitra herself realises: I keep hoping there was the chance I might stumble upon a fuller file, misnamed, misplaced, or even tucked away in another file but I had no such luck this is all you have and youve to make do with it(15). Interestingly though, there is mention of the thinnai in the report. Sellammas father, it is documented, often held a panchayat5 on the thinnai of his house, whenever necessary(16). Its role as a reconciliatory platform to settle disputes amongst the members of the settlement is significant here. It is only when Sumitra reconciles with the body of communal memory that she can truly cross the thinnai and be led into its home. At the initial stage however, she hovers hesitantly at its entrance. In the official version of Sellammas history, there seems to be nothing more that Sumitra can obtain. There are many missing links in its frame. For instance, it is documented that she came from rubber plantation parents, though that wasnt their true descent, whatever that means(16). The statement emphasises the blurred representations of the subaltern in official discourse as much as it speaks too of the difficulties in accessing the finer details outside its scope. Sellamma is the sole survivor of her family. Her parents are said to have disappeared without trace, presumably having returned to India. The story of the early experiences of Indian settlement in Malaya is often left untraced precisely because there is no real subaltern voice recorded in history. This could also speak of the reasons why the subaltern figure disappears from communal consciousness. If, as many have argued, the subaltern narrative is to be found in folk memory, then what happens when there is no kin for the story to succeed into the future? Maniam, I believe creatively articulates this issue in Between Lives. With no surviving descendant to claim the land that Sellamma owns, in the event of her demise, it will in all probability transfer quite effortlessly into the hands of the developers. The luxurious gated neighbourhood that they plan to build on its site will result not only in a physical elimination of Sellammas property. More symbolically, it will create a palimpsest over earlier subaltern markings. However, just as subaltern ground is reclaimed through such discursive enunciations in the (postcolonial) present, in the course of the novel, the deed to Sellammas land is claimed in the end by Sumitra when the older woman dies and she continues the latters fight to hold on to it. This transformation from stranger to beneficiary is allegorically rendered through a series of events that I define as rituals of reconciliation guided by Sellamma. They become the thinnai or transit spaces that facilitate the interaction of the inner world of subalternised

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communal memory with its beneficiaries in the present, those who have remained for so long strangers to its abode. In this sense, just as Periathai transformed her grandchildrens awareness of the ancestral world that they never really knew, Sellamma puts into play a similar transformation. Only this time, the ancestral land isnt the imaginary India but a coolie past that has been almost scraped from communal memory. Leela Gandhi, expanding Homi Bhabhas argument on the notion of postcolonial remembering as a restoration of a dismembered past, writes that the colonial aftermath combines notions of repression and repudiation in its relationship to the colonial past. This unwillingness to remember, she says,
is matched by its terrified repudiation and expulsion of this past. In response, the theoretical re-membering of the colonial condition is called upon to fulfil two corresponding functions. The first which Bhabha foregrounds as the simple disinterment of unpalatable memories, seeks to uncover the overwhelming and lasting violence of colonisation. The second is ultimately reconciliatory in its attempt to make the hostile and antagonistic past more familiar and therefore more approachable. The fulfilment of this latter project requires that the images expelled by the violence of the postcolonial Verwefung [repudiation] be reclaimed and reowned again. (1998: 10)

Sumitras uncovering of Sellammas history must progress into a more reconciliatory effort. The simple disinterment of facts from the official files cannot serve this function. Neither can her plan to use her resemblance to Sellammas estranged sister, Anjalai, achieve anything more than a mere restaging of history: (Ive her voice, and more importantly her mistaking me for her! All Ive to do is build on that confusion(25)). Such attempts can succeed only in creating more representational layers over the body of subaltern memory, and repress in its stead the possibility of letting someone from within its hinterland be heard6. Ironically though, while Sumitra believes she is merely playing a role, she ultimately becomes an active participant in the drama of reconciliation that follows. Two rituals mediate her transgression into the interior of Sellamas house of memory. In the first, she is required to re-connect with the abandoned land of ancestral memory, allegorised in the sequence that unfolds in the RamaSita grove, a little garden at the edge of Sellammas premises: We are bringing the changkuls7 down together then the thud comes, we crack the lumps or earth, knock them into looser soil, and move on It sinks into the ground . She earns her rite of passage when it is seen that her earth hands are coming back (63). The second reconciliatory ritual asks for an immersion in the river nearby, a form of baptism into ancestral memory: You must enter it to bring me out. You must enter it to bring yourself out.(64). Thereafter, Sumitra moves

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past her transit space on the thinnai: The baptism in the river has certainly made her more comfortable with me, or perhaps the illusion that Im her sister. She seems ready to take me deeper into her memories (64). This is notably allegorically realised in Sellammas action of opening up the house and restoring it to the condition she lived in a long time ago (68). The narrative sequence from that point of her initiation builds heavily on various metaphors and allegories. At the centre of it is not only my metaphor of the thinnai but also a significant evocation of the meta-narrative of Indian diasporic consciousness, the Ramayana. This is seen not only in the fact that the grove is named after the lead characters of the epic. Its image calls to mind also the fertile land of Chitrakuta that the exiled party settles in after leaving Ayodhya, referred to sometimes as the garden of the gods8. But there is also Asokas grove, the grove where the demon king Ravana imprisons Sitha after kidnapping her and that plot is untended and overgrown, in a sense the antithesis of Chitrakuta. In the novel, this is paralleled in the fact that Sellammas grove has been left untended until Sumitras arrival, symbolising perhaps the abandoned grove of communal history. Then there is also the ritual of cleansing in the river which evokes a similar scene in the epic where Rama and his party bathe in the river Ganges to spiritually cleanse themselves after the months of wandering from Ayodhya9. Such parallels point to the creativity of the migrant imaginary as it reterritorialises both cultural and physical landscapes. This becomes more evident as Sumitra is taken deeper into this new terrain. In many ways, this journey reinscribes too her consciousness of her communal history. Its initial passage is allegorically rendered in her progression through the various rooms in the house. Here, we see the formation of an alternative and more personal narrative of coolie history. There is first the visual form displayed in a panel of family photographs that offer another vision of coolie experience. Captured in various frames are shots of newlyweds (her parents and her sisters and brothers), her entire family in front of their bleak, attap, esate house trying to smile but their tappers and weeders clothes wont let them (73). In a fair number, the eye behind the camera is the coolies and not the masters. The vision of the colonial seeing-eye is thus displaced by that of the subaltern. A substantial portion of these photographs depict her father in various scenes and they point to his extensive influence on Sellamma. He is in many ways the root source of her reterritorialised consciousness. The design of the house with its amalgamation of both Malay and Indian architectural features is not the only evidence. He is also the first to merge the contents of the epic text of the Ramayana on to the Malayan landscape:
Before the night meal, their father insisted, in his gentle and reflective way, that they read the Ramayana. Sellamma said he wanted them to feel the magical

Transfigurative Diasporic Consciousness plentifulness of the land, to treat everything with the greatest respect. He told them a spirit filled everything, whether evoked in those mythical tales or in their actual lives. He wanted them to feel its benevolence, and not be frightened by the entire wilderness that lay about them. (108)

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By recontextualising the ancestral epic, the boundaries of the migrant sensibility are increasingly worn down and they are transmuted even more in succeeding generations. We see this not only in Sellammas Rama-Sita Grove. The deer that is encountered in the pages of the Ramayana is also present in the Malayan jungle and both merge in their consciousness. There appears to be, however, no awareness of this transfiguration in Sumitras generation. In the novel, the present is more imbued with the texts of magazines such as the glossy Cosmopolitan that Sumitra reads regularly. However, when Sellamma speaks of her trips into the jungle, Sumitra draws a parallel with her trips to an exclusive Club that she patronizes. In this counter-narrative however, the images do not reflect the synthesis that is seen in Sellammas (and her fathers) era. This particular club not only had a jogging track and a golf course which are usually popular with city dwellers but was built specially to converge with the surrounding jungle, being perfectly landscaped into the age old-trees and vegetation(132). The parallel points to the ways in which the Malaysian landscape in its natural form is hardly considered worthy in the present unless it is converted into economic activity. It is also the reason why Sellammas land is so keenly sought after by developers. However, with every step deeper into the ground of communal memory, Sumitra finds that it is increasingly difficult to keep to her original intent, to relocate the older woman so her land can be developed. The narrative continues to demonstrate this struggle to regain control. In many ways, Sumitra engages in the very technique that colonial writers used to gain control of their (narrative) world. She strives to ensure that the weight of narrative authority remains on her side even though the source is really Sellamma. Here again, subaltern markings are in danger of being reinscribed:
It looks like Ive to put her through her rite of passage. Its time she came out of memory land, time to do that trip into the jungle again shes certainly going to be mauled this time. Not by tigers or wild boars, but by the harshness of it all. If she gets into the depths of the jungle that is. I think shell have the strength. Its a cruel thing to do, but its the only way to make her realize her memories are only illusions. (196)

However, agency of the subaltern figure is also demonstrated as Sellamma resists Sumitras plans. The trip into the jungle becomes the third ritual of initiation for Sumitra. What was to have been her journey to drive out the spectre of memory becomes instead her rite of passage into its territory as she is

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confronted with the extent to which the present has destroyed its links with the past. The episode is marked with images of devastation in the wide tractor marks and the wrecking devices that have been used to clear the jungle (199200). Its narrative presence is not merely to put forth an argument on development and its ill effects. I argue that on a subliminal level it points to the devastated ground of communal memory. It is this confrontation that finally moves Sumitra to listen to the sub-currents of Sellammas memories. She finally understands what Sellamma means when she keeps reiterating the need to look behind the silence (201). The Malaysian Indian community in the present must engage with its coolie past instead of striving to efface its markings on the landscape of national memory. The barriers between the two women are finally removed and it is now Sumitra who engages in a reterritorialisation of ancestral ground. She finally acknowledges her role in its larger design:
Ive come to Sellammas place not just to see her through her memories, but also to sort myself out...Ive come here, knowing Ive to bring Sellamma, and myself, through all this, somehow intact. I let her think Im the wayward Anjalai, come back this time to stay, so her memories can at last become real. (224)

Maniams technique of playing out the scenes of such resistance and transformation is very much along the lines of what Ashcroft (2001) speaks of below:
literary writing demonstrates that resistance, and the agency of the local, is most powerful when it is transformative. By taking hold of writing, whether as novel, history, testimonio, by appropriating political discourse and political structures, by interpolating educational discourse and institutions, transforming conceptions of place, culture, even economics, the post-colonial subject unleashes a rapidly circulating transcultural energy. ( 216)

In placing the previously subaltern figure at the centre of his text and repositioning her as a resisting figure, he not only transforms her condition of subalternity but more importantly makes her an agent of change in the postcolonial realm. It is through this repositioning that we witness the effects of the circulatory transcultural energy that Ashcroft speaks of. From the point of this third ritual, the narrative takes us into a deeper engagement with the disembodied past and in the process Sumitras own family members are drawn into this site. They come to persuade Sumitra to return home but the journey inadvertently leads them to the transformative thinnai of Sellammas house. The words of Sellammas mother when she insisted on retaining it seem etched onto its surface like an echoing mantra. No one is able

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to shake away their memories when they step onto its transgressive platform. Sumitras mother is the first to arrive at this reconciliatory enclave and the story of her coolie past unfolds mainly on the thinnai. More receptive to the transformation than even Sumitra was, Gowri decides to stay on with the daughter and relates her coolie beginnings. We learn that her father was a conductor in a colonial plantation. Though initially a respected figure, he becomes disillusioned when he fails countless times to obtain land titles for his community (the coolies under his charge). As a result, he turns to his woman to reinstate the power that he has lost. Both Gowri and her mother suffer his many bouts of violence (248-253). The most significant change however, is notably in Sumitras father. In him, we have the epitome of the middle class Malaysian Indian who refuses to acknowledge his own coolie history. Early on in the novel, he makes it very clear that he has no debt to pay to his (coolie) history: History? You think history brought us all this? ... his sweeping gesture including the two-storey bungalow resting on a spacious compound (9). This is reflected again when he arrives in search of his missing wife and daughter. Sumitra leads him to the Rama-Sita grove, hoping he too will see the connection:
My father stands at the edge, with a hint of wonder and yes, there is that revulsion on his face again. he seldom talked about his early days He gave me the impression that he came from a large family, but dismissed his brothers and sisters, saying They wouldnt listen to me. They wouldnt listen to me. They wanted to bury themselves in some hole of an estate. (My grandmother, however, was strangely silent about her other sons and daughters.) He talked glowingly about his university days, but its his job that seems to have given him a real start in life. (286)

On one level, it does reflect the capacity of reinventing identity, the signature mark of the Malaysian Indian diasporic sensibility. Yet this is where the comparison with his coolie ancestors ends. They did not discard elements from the past. It was intricately woven into a pattern that melded Indian heritage with Malayan space. For Sumitras father, and many like him in the present generation of Malaysian Indians who migrated out of the coolie world, the old world is most often a repulsive reminder of an earlier position of subjugation and thus felt best discarded from the more lucrative present. However, as that journey to retrieve his wife and daughter has him crossing the space of the thinnai, the transformation of his consciousness is inevitable. It slowly unravels in his subsequent visits, until the man who scoffed at history finally realises that Sellammas memories are our memories (17). This transfiguration is rendered in one of the last and most significant rituals of reconciliation in the novel. Through it, the disclaimed image of the coolie is finally revived and re-

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integrated into the space of the present. By this time, Sumitras two brothers and their wives also gather inside this hallowed house of memory. Their presence there is initially under false pretences. Sumitras father arranges for them to masquerade as Sellammas estranged family members. Yet again though, what was planned with the intent of abandoning the landscape of communal ground transgresses instead into a ritual that bring(s) back to life what was not living properly (a constant narrative refrain of Sellammas). They don the work clothes of the coolie family, a metaphor for the acceptance of their coolie heritage. In the sacrament of deliverance that unfolds
Sellamma lights the lamp at the prayer niche, then scatters some incense into the brazier and waves it thrice round the idols and the panel of photographs. Then she lights the camphor and standing with the tray before her, fills the air with a strange sound. It isnt like the chanting she did at that first puja; its more like a keening. From what I can make out, she is calling for her great loneliness to be banished, and for those who had deserted her to return to the fold. (296)

This right of passage into the present channels a catharsis for Sellamma as she begins to cry. She cries as if in relief and gratitude, the sounds coming from deep inside her throat like breath freshly released (298). It is simultaneously a cathartic moment for the exiled body of the past that is finally allowed into the boundaries of the present. Not long after Sellamma draws her final breath, bequeathing Sumitra not only with the written deed of the land but also the much more significant deed of retaining it. Her departure from the novel is marked by the last significant ritual in the novel, the performance of her last rites by both Sumitra and her father (the latter performing the cremation, the former the karumadi or requiem for the soul of the departed). The novel comes to a close a few chapters later, depicting Sumitras struggle with the developers. While she may not be successful, there isnt the sense of despair that is normally articulated when Maniams characters fail to retain their land. Perhaps this is because the land that Sellamma was defending was in essence the land of memory and having had that accepted by her forerunners, she can finally move on. Ultimately in this novel, Maniam uses the language of ritual as the platform to reclaim the ground of subalternity. It is the thinnai, the transit space, that can facilitate the transfiguration of communal consciousness from its liminal relationship with the coolie past. Ritual as the performative rites of the people as opposed to the formal liturgies of written history (the likes of colonial documentation and its Manichean vortex as discussed in the early chapters) allows the writer to engage an allegorical re-visioning of communal history which can be likened to Wilson Harriss notion of a literature of renascence:

Transfigurative Diasporic Consciousness I believe the possibility exists for us to become involved in perspectives of renascence which can bring into play a figurative meaning beyond an apparently real world or prison of historyI believe a philosophy of history may well lay buried in the arts of the imagination. (qtd in Dash 1995: 201)

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By employing the artistry of his imagination, Maniam creates in this novel (and the others explored earlier) a regeneration of the Malaysian Indian past. It may not be a golden age that he beckons as it is one that is steeped in the pain of dislocation and haunted by subalternity. However its landscape is admittedly one which is rich in the figurative play of images from the culture that was formed out of this very experience. Individuals like Sellamma and Periathai as well as all those others seen in this chapter transfigured ancestral lore when they crossed the thinnai or verandah between inner and outer, from the liminality of the migrant experience into the transcultured space of citizenship of a diasporic existence, seeking to belong to a new homeland. The presence and endurance of the Indian diaspora in Malaysia for the past 150 years or so is thus based on the formation of an identity through movement, through its ruptures from an ancient tradition and its harnessing of new ones. Rising from the graveyards of poverty in India, the Indian immigrants of the nineteenth and early twentieth century set into motion an ananda tandava of their own. They generated the dynamics of diasporic identity in the midst of destruction. Though deemed docile in the plantations and other places of labour that they were transported to, their ability to sustain a Tamil landscape on foreign soil was no spiritless feat, as illustrated in the analysis above. Regrettably, the significance of their contribution to the cloak of identity handed down to the present Malaysian Indian is disregarded by most, deluded by derogatory representations of the Indian immigrant labourers in historical narratives. This allegorical interpolation of the three motifs of transfiguration in this last chapter is my effort to reposition the established tables of value that have fixed the Indian immigrants as listless subjects of Malaysian history, fixtures that have dwarfed their dynamism as choreographers who set the Indian consciousness in a new sequence, the sequence of diaspora. It believes that such confrontations with the past are necessary in order to free the present from the snares of illusion and to grant the coolies their due place on the stage upon which the politics of Malaysian identity is performed.

Notes
1
2

See Arasaratnam and Sandhu for details of this issue. An earlier version of this discourse on the kolam has appeared as the article A Portrait of the Imagination as a Malleable Kolam: KS Maniams In a Far Country Jouvert: A Journal of Postcolonial Studies, Vol 5 Issue 1 (Autumn) 2000.

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3 Maniam alluded to this in his public lecture Between Lives: Glittering Lights revealing Darkness delivered on the 9th of October 2003, as part of the Centre of the Arts, National University of Singapores Writers Talk 2003. 4 I am reminded here of the notion of the eradication of ignorance in the discourse of the cosmic dancer in the earlier section. Sivasurians text becomes the uduku that drums in Rajans consciousness and releases a higher awareness of self. 5 A Tamil term for a form of village council meeting, normally held to settle disputes among villagers. 6 I do not mean here that the subaltern does indeed speak in the novel as it is ultimately the fictional representation of the writer. However, the creative interpolation of her story into the narrative frame allows a possibility for a (re)semblance of that voice. 7 Malaysian term for a garden rake or hoe. 8 Chitrakuta is compared to the Ghandarva groves of the Himalaya, seen as a garden of the gods with fertile land. The version I refer to here is William Bucks translation of the Ramayana (William Buck, Ramayana B.A Van Nooten intr. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass Publishers 2000) 9 Arguably, there exist several versions of this episode in the Ramayana. In the online edition of the translation of Valmikis Ramayana obtained from <http://www.valmikiramayan.net/ayodhya/sarga50/ayodhya_50_prose.htm> it is stated that Rama merely speaks of the spiritual cleansing properties of the Ganges River. However in William Bucks version of the epic the following scene : Rama and Sita, Lakshmana and Sumantra all bathed in the beautiful Ganges, where bathing may wash off the sins from his heart as he takes the dirt from his skin, and both come out clean.(87) does indeed parallel the scene in Between Lives. There is also another parallel of the epic in Sellammas words to Sumitra: We always come here after working in the Rama-Sita grove. And after family quarrels or celebrations. More after the quarrels(64) for the reason for Rama and his exiled party leaving Ayodhya is similiarly due to a family misunderstanding.

CONCLUSION THE POLITICS OF CONTEMPORARY MALAYSIAN INDIAN IDENTITY

Whenever the topic of globalisation and the Malaysian Indian identity arises, the emphasis is almost always on the ways to deftly utilise the opportunities that are made available by globalisation without however compromising on Indian cultural or moral attributes. The ticket to this new stage is evidently the gleaming new feature of globalisation, the catchphrase of present day Malaysia However, at no point does the figure of the Indian labourer come into this equation. The coolie image is all but forcefully ushered from the stage of the performance of the politics of Malaysian Indian identity as it vies for recognition within an international context. The way the majority of Malaysian Indians look at the coolie past is illumined only with the harsh light of dismissal. However, if there can be space for a reconsideration of this body of the past in much the same way that I have done in my investigation of the Indian coolie figures of colonial Malaya, what may arise out of such re-visions is that it is not the coolie who is a shameful figure but rather the way in which (s)he has been envisioned in textual history. If we strive only to cast them off our memories, do we not then form new crates that will stash them away into yet another corner of national history? Is there no way for the present day Malaysian Indian community to responsibly integrate the patterns of its coolie past into this reterritorialised space of a globalised identity? Ravindra Jain, speaking of the Indian diaspora and the issue of globalisation, writes that
Boundaries are drawn and redrawn across space and time around particular cultures wherever difference between cultures is emphasised in the everyday life of communities in all countries. Defining the difference is at the heart of the problematique of diasporic culture in the era of globalisation. The view of culture as continuous does not mean the abandonment of emphasis on the reinforcing and reproductive aspects of culture. Another way of expressing this would be to say that an essentialist core is thereby retained amidst all the flux and change . (1999: 196)

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I believe that this is applicable to the Malaysian Indian scene. In the bid to assert the globalised self, the community utilises the diasporic imaginary to reinvent itself through reinforcing and reproducing aspects of an ancestral culture. In this way they retain what is seen to be essentially Indian. However, in the process, the earlier coolie markings are abandoned as they are notably seen to be a reminder of a subordinate and subjugated past. Globalisation appears to offer the present Malaysian Indian community an avenue to escape the subaltern markings of their history. It certainly appears to be seen as a platform for a renewed Indian identity, for as the borders are broken down the desired cosmopolitan identity becomes increasingly within reach. Yet, we Malaysian Indians should be aware that this crossing of borders and breaking down of set demarcations of boundaries is not a new thing within our communal history. According to Peter Clammer, migration, diaspora and culture-contact have been the very elements out of which contemporary South East Asian identities are constructed, and the social structures of every society in the region are witnesses to the fact that globalisation existed there as a reality before the word itself was ever coined (2002: 9). He adds too that long before postmodernism was ever heard of the fundamental character of the region was genius for synthesis, a blending of differences and the coexistence of alternatives within the same spatial contexts (10). The Indian coolies of Malaya, as I have shown, essentially generated the dynamics of a diasporic identity as they reterritorialised the Indian self in a foreign land. The last chapter particularly demonstrated the genius of synthesis that Clammer speaks of here. In this way, it can be said that the seeds of globalisation were already planted early on by them. Why is it then that when the issue of globalisation and the Malaysian Indian identity is spoken about in the present, the image of the coolie seems to be seen as nothing more than a stumbling block to its development? Is Stuart Hall not justified then when he says that globalisation is located within a much longer history; we suffer increasingly from a process of historical amnesia in which we think that just because we are thinking about an idea it has only just started (1991: 20). The markings of cosmopolitanism appear to be the most sought after insignia of the globalised communal self. However, this process effectively creates a palimpsest over the figures of its initiators who struggled to reinvent an overseas Indian culture under the burden of the heavier markings of subalternity. In this way we partake wholly and consciously in creating our own web of historical amnesia. We obviously fail to remember that, to cite Hall again,
we bear the traces of a past, the connections of the past. The past is not waiting for us back there to recoup our identities against. It is always retold, rediscovered, reinvented. It has to be narrativized. We go to our own pasts through history, through memory, through desire, not as a literal fact. (58)

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Where, I ask, does this then leave subaltern space? Postcolonial deconstructive criticism of the discursive representations of the coolie experience, such as the one I have attempted in this book, can admittedly help to reclaim this lost ground of communal memory and hopefully elicit a more involved recognition of the pioneer artists of the diasporic identity that we have inherited as Malaysian Indians. This said though, the tendency is that such writings often circulate mainly within the walls of academia. If this is the case, then is this not in danger of leading to what Stephen Slemon and Helen Tiffin(qtd. in Huggan 2001: 260) caution as being a wholesale retreat from geography and history into a domain of pure textuality, in which the principle of indeterminacy smothers the possibility of social or political significance for literature? The reason I undertook this research project was to look for ways in which the image of the Indian coolies of my communal past could be given a new lease of life. The most important audience would naturally be Malaysian Indians of present day Malaysia. As Barbara Christian aptly puts it, we need to recognize that literature is not merely for discourse among critics but is necessary nourishment for [our] people and one way by which they come to understand their lives better (1995: 458). Creative writings that deal with the whole issue of subalternity and the Malaysian Indian experience can close the distance between the present and the largely abandoned terrain of coolie memory. In this sense, K.S. Maniams works would arguably be the most relevant platform to achieve this. The inclusion of his novel, The Return in the syllabus of texts required for the literature component in Malaysian schools, is, to me, already a significant step towards this. The act proved to be a marked moment of inclusion for the Malaysian Indian community. It means they are being read, made visible in a world where they are otherwise often rendered invisible. They are a minority, making up only eight percent of the countrys population of almost 22 million. Perhaps this has a lot to do with their desire to discard coolie connections if it is seen as a deterrent to their advancement in society. Maniams works significantly present the various facets of Malaysian Indian identity and he deals extensively with the divisiveness that exists within its communal grounds. I believe delving into these various issues will create a deeper understanding of the images and self-images of the Indian community in the country. There needs to be a deeper integration of the coolie past into the globalised present, an intermingling of colonial history with an increasingly globalised consciousness. On another level however, I am aware that when notions of nationhood seem to strongly advocate the erasure of boundaries, the sense of the past especially in the Malaysian scene becomes problematic. The strongest concern appears to be whether the boundary of culture is the very thing that stands in the way of our achieving a fuller sense of nationhood? However, my answer to that is: if we

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Conclusion

take another look at the past, we will see, as I have clearly shown in my argument throughout, that boundaries were already permeable as early as the nineteenth century, whether in terms of the coloniser and the colonised or between the colonised themselves. The design of nationhood is thus not solely a post-independence phenomenon. As Bill Ashcroft perceptively puts it: The question which must be faced ultimately is: does the concern with colonization involve an intellectual orientation that is inescapably backward-looking? Do we find ourselves looking back to the effects of power relationship which no longer seem relevant? (2001: 16). He suggests that the answer to this is twofold. In one sense,
the effects of European imperialism and the transformative engagements it has experienced from post-colonial societies are ones that have affected, and continue to affect, most of the world to the present day. This engagement has come to colour and identify the very nature of those societies in contemporary times. (16)

My discussion of the Indian coolie experience of Malaya has invariably revealed this very transformative feature that Ashcroft alludes to. Yet as I argued too, preconceived notions of that experience have become the identification marks that stand as barriers between the working class and the middle class within the Malaysian Indian community. The power relationship is thus extremely relevant to the contemporary scene. But then there is the matter of Ashcrofts second answer:
the dynamic of the power relationship which characterize colonial experience, has now achieved a global status. The issue of globalization recasts the whole question of post-colonial identity. Both imperialism and globalization are consequences of the onrushing tide of European imperialism. But while we cannot see globalization as a simple extension of imperialism, a kind of neoimperialism the engagement of imperial culture by post-colonial societies offers a compelling model for the relationship between the local and the global. (16)

The encounter between the coolie and his master is indeed a compelling model for the transformative relation between local and the global today. It works also to dispute the notion that the West is the dominant signifier in this new relationship. In this way, the past is undoubtedly relevant to the current global. One must consciously work towards returning the Malaysian Indian past from its state of exile. As Maniam perceptively puts it at the end of Between Lives: We must follow every twist and turn of our memories, fearlessly, so we wont be easily put off our tracks. [] Then, maybe well return from our exile [] yes, return from our exile (388). This book has been in many senses a discussion of the politics of Malaysian Indian identity from colonised to

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globalised grounds and the ways in which the subaltern spaces of the former can be reclaimed and reterritorialised in the latter.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Official Records
Federated Malay States (F.M.S). Annual Report of the Indian Immigration Committee Meeting, 1920. . Indian Immigration to the Federated Malay States: Resolutions and Recommendations of a Commission appointed by the Acting Resident General FMS, 1900. . Official Verbatim Report of Meeting of the Indian Immigration Committee, 9 March 1927. Kuala Lumpur: The Commercial Press, 1927. India. Annual Report of the Government of India in British Malaya, 1926. . Annual Report of the Agent of the Government of India in British Malaya, 1930. Straits Settlements. Report of the Commission of Enquiry into the State of Labour in the Straits Settlements and the Protected Native States, 1890.

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Ainsworth, Leopold. The Confessions of a Planter in Malaya: A Chronicle of Life and Adventure in the Jungle. London: H.F.&G Witherby, 1933. Aiyer, K.A. N. Indian Problems in Malaya. Kuala Lumpur: India Office, 1938. Alatas, Syed Husein. The Myth of the Lazy Native: A Study of the Image of the Malays, Filipinos and Javanese from the 16th to the 20th Century and its Function in the Ideology of Colonial Capitalism. London: Frank Cass, 1977. Anderson, Mrs Reginald. The Population of Malaya. Twentieth Century Impressions of British Malaya: Its History, People, Commerce, Industries and Resources. Ed. Arnold Wright. 1903. Singapore: Graham Brash, 1989. 123-131. Ang, Ien. Migrations of Chineseness. SPAN , 34-35 (1992-3). 6 June 2003. <http://wwwmcc.murdoch.edu.au/ReadingRoom/litserv/SPAN/34/Ang. html> Arasaratnam, Sinnapah. Indians in Malaya and Singapore. Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press, 1979.

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Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin. The Empire Writes Back. 1989. London: Routledge, 2002. Ashcroft, Bill. Postcolonial Transformation. London: Routledge, 2001. Bahktin, Mikhail M. The Dialogic Imagination : Four Essays. Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, Ed. Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981. Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture. London& New York: Routledge, 1994. . Postcolonial Criticism. Redrawing the Boundaries: The Transformation of English and American Literary Studies. Eds. Stephen Greenblatt and Giles Gunn. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1992. 437-465. Bird, Isabella. The Golden Chersonese: The Malayan Travels of a Victorian Lady. 1883. Singapore: Oxford University Press, 1990. Boulle, Henri. Sacrilege in Malaya. Trans. Xan Fielding.1959. Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press, 1983. Bush, Willard C. Pahang: The Saga of a Rubber Planter in the Malay Jungle. New York: the Macmillan Company, 1938. Butcher. J.G. The British in Malaya 1880-1941: The Social History of a European Community in Colonial South East Asia. Singapore: Oxford University Press. 1979. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. A Small History of Subaltern Studies. A Companion to Postcolonial Studies. Eds. Henry Scharwz, and Sangeeta Ray. London: Blackwell, 2000. 467-485. Chakravarthi, Uma. Whatever Happened to the Vedic Dasi: Orientalism, Nationalism and Script for the Past. Recasting Women: Essays in Colonial History. Eds. Kum Kum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid. New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1997. 27-87. Chatterjee, Partha. The Nationalist Resolution of the Womens Question. Recasting Women: Essays in Colonial History. Eds. Kum Kum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid. New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1997. 233-253. Christian, Barbara. The Race for Theory. The Post-Colonial Studies Reader. Eds. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin. London: Routledge, 1995. 457-460. Cixous, Helene. Coming to Writing and Other Essays. London: Harvard University Press, 1991. Clammer, John. Diaspora and Identity: The Sociology of Culture in Southeast Asia. Selangor : Pelanduk Publications, 2002. Collins, Elizabeth Fuller. Pierced by Murugans Lance: Ritual, Power and Moral Redemption among Malaysian Hindus. DeKalb: Northern Illinois Press, 1997.

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INDEX

Ainsworth, Leopold vi, 21-44 Alterity 62 Appropriation 38, 55, 86, 93, Bakhtin, Mikhail 61, Belonging 107, 116, 118,126 Benevolence v, 43,56, 134 Bhabha, Homi 55, 90, 92, Boulle, Pierre vi, 22, 56-69,75-81, 84 Bush, Willard C vi, 22, 44-57, 81-86 Capitalist/Capitalism vi, 3, 10, 13, 22, 24, 26, 29, 31, 35, 51, 61, 65, 68, 73, 79, 81, 94, 96, Caste 99, 111 Coercion 64-66, Colonial Control iii-vi, 1-16 Confessions of a Planter in Malaya, 22, 27-44 Coolie(s) as children 51-52, 84 and children 51, 81-83, 86, 88, 111 contract, iii, 8- 14, absconding /desertion, 6, 8, 13-15, 51-52 and disease, 37, 38, 49, 83, 85, death , 49, 50, 56, 83, 86, festivals/celebrations, 16, 36, 74, 98, 99, and health/hygiene/sanitation, 27, 49, 50, 83, living quarters/lines, 12, 30, 33, 39, 47, 49, 51, 53, recruitment, iv, 1, 8, 9, 10, 81, and religion, 15,36, 49-50, 91, 99, 102, 103,

riot, 16 women, 71-86 voyage/journey, 3, 8, 28, 68 and violence, 30, 35, 38, 39, 43, 49, 52, 55, 73, and commodification / as commodity/ 3, 23, 24, Cosmic Dancer/dance, 108, 109- 118 Dialectics, 21 Diaspora, 7, 81-83, 86, 92, 96, 102, 107, 108, 113, 115, 118, 119, 125, 127, 140 Displaced/displacement, 5, 17, 53, 55, 67, 73, 74, 77, 82, 90, 92, 94, 97, 102, 134, Docility, ii, iii, iv, 2, 7, 12, 13, 16, 18, 36, 42, 71, 140, Exile, 94, 95, 96, 101, 107, 133, 148 Exclusion, 26, 58 Fanon, Frantz, 23 Fauconnier, Henri, 56, 69 Gramsci, Antonio, v Hanuman, 111-112 Hegemony, 69 Homeland, vii, 68, 71, 109, 114, 116, 117, 129, 140 Hybrid, 55, 107, 120 Ideology, iii, 2, 32, 35, 38, 41, 46, 47 Indenture, 2, 7, 29, 46, Interpolation 93, 101, 102, 112, 140

Colonial Visions, Postcolonial Revisions: Images of the Indian Diaspora in Malaysia JanMohamed, Abdul 23, 24 Othering, 23, 36, Outcaste ii Patriarchy, 84-86

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Kabbani, Rana, 75, 76, 79, 84, Kangani, 8, 14, 33, 76, 81 Kolam, 108, 115-128 Liminality, 104, 105, 108, 117, 118, 119, 120, 124, 125, 135, 139, 140, Lord Nataraja, see cosmic dancer Maniam, KS, 69, 88-105 Manichean allegory, 23, 24, 25, 44, 48, 52, 53, 54, Nandy, Ashis, 96, 99 Nationhood, 118,

Radhakrishnan, R., 104, 107, Ramayana, 100, 102-104, 110, 113, 127, 132, 133, Resistance, i, ii, 29, 37, 52-56, 61, 64 Sacrilege in Malaya (see Boulle, Pierre) Subaltern, v-vii, 3, 7, 23, 7, 31, 33, 36, 39, 40, 42, 50-56, 60, 69, 71, 73, 74, 78, 83, 87-89, 90, 92-94, 96, 101, 103, 107, 110, 111, 120, 121, 125, 129, 130, 131, 133-135, 138-139.

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