Plantation songs as archives of memory

The songs considered in this article are from the collection of over 500 Tamil plantation songs compiled by R. Thandayutham, who, in the 1980s, spent four years in the plantations of Malaysia sound recording plantation songs. Though he was able to collect a large corpus of songs, in the preface to his work, his friend Murasu NedumaranFootnote ⁸ notes that he was unable to retrieve them fully because the older generations had already passed away. Several ellipses in his published collection denote the lapses of memory, and the songs that passed from one generation to the next often come in fragments. Sadly, Thandayutham passed away before completing his fieldwork, leaving the entire corpus to be published posthumously by his wife and daughter in 1989. The songs include topics like the plantation, the journey, the Englishman, family, relations, lullabies, and laments about memories of India, and expectations from Gandhi and India's freedom movement. Thus, the songs offer an interesting record of how the indentured workers in Malayan plantations placed themselves in relation to the political turmoil on the global scale. They collate nearly a hundred years of experiences and memories that, with the passing of the generations and disappearance of older forms of estate life, are on the verge of disappearing; the second and third generations have already moved away from the plantations to the urban centres, the nature of the plantations has changed as they become part of a multinational industrial-agricultural complex, and Tamil labour is slowly replaced by the immigrant labour from other parts of South Asia.Footnote ⁹

As an account of the plantation life of Tamil labour in Malaya, the songs stand within the larger tradition of music composed and produced by labour in plantation economies, like the protest songs of indentured labour from Guiana,Footnote ¹⁰ or those tracing the history and memory of migration,Footnote ¹¹ or the transnationalization of aesthetic expressions in the process.Footnote ¹² Work songs have been a major part of the range of folk songs from South India, particularly the state of Tamil Nadu. In the agricultural setting, rhythms adapt to work situations like sowing, picking, and harvesting, all of which call for concerted labour: they serve as ‘an index not merely of economic activity but of the social situation'.Footnote ¹³ Those that involve women provide a glimpse of perception of them and their labour within social systems, like the framework of coloniality and patriarchy in the case of Tamils in Malaya. According to Ramasamy, more than two-thirds of Tamil work songs originated in the rural sector and pertain to women.Footnote ¹⁴ In the process of migration, work songs from Tamil Nadu were modified and adapted to the conditions of Malayan plantations.Footnote ¹⁵ Hence they offer a rich social context of Tamil society, the role of women, the perception of women's labour, and also migration to Malaya and the changes brought about in Tamil society in the process. In the colonial accounts most of the songs have been written off as ‘noise’. For instance, a plantation manager in Malaya in 1898 dismissed the labour song as ‘jibber-jabber’, decrying the absence in the Tamil labour songs of ‘the sentimental glow’ that surrounded ‘the negro's life’ on a slave plantation and the ‘happy times’ conjured by their slave songs.Footnote ¹⁶ However, more recent scholarship has reinterpreted the plantation songs and music to get a glimpse of the plantation societies from below, that is, from the point of view of the labourers.

If one wonders why it took nearly a hundred years and a few erratic attempts to document the songs or the reason for their limited circulation and lack of translation, one is forced to reflect on the powerlessness of the Tamil plantation workers, especially the women—the subaltern here is not silent, she sings of her troubles; her voice can be heard clearly as she complains, cries, and rages. However, her fading experiences and memories are what the narratives of colonial or post-colonial Malaysia would like to forget or, more likely, tell them differently, as we shall see later.

The obscurity of the Tamil plantation songs, therefore, problematizes the field of collective memories and highlights the politics of remembering and forgetting in colonial and post-colonial Malaysia. In the plural, multicultural society of post-independence Malaysia, the field of memory is marked by diversity and conflict. It is a constant battlefield where the dominant narratives of nation-making, national history, and memory negotiate with the subaltern memory texts.Footnote ¹⁷ Maniam's 2003 novel cited above and Jomo's 1984 picture book about a Tamil estate girl, discussed below, constitute collective cultural memories that use day-to-day accounts like the disappearing plantations and urban poverty among Malaysian Indians (Maniam) and the long-suffering of the Tamil plantation woman (Jomo) to produce the figure of the Malaysian Tamil woman and her experiences. By virtue of their publication and state endorsement (Maniam and Jomo are celebrated writers and academics; Jomo's picture book is also backed by governmental and academic bodies), these narratives have found their way into the canons of Malaysian Indian cultural memory, as the version of the past that is actively remembered in the present. These coexist alongside colonial narratives like those of Ainsworth and Boulle and supplement the colonial records of production and indenture in the plantations.

The plantation songs, on the other hand, constitute archival memory which, though existent, remains understudied.Footnote ¹⁸ The obscurity of the songs, as ‘The politics of forgetting’ below discusses in detail, reflects the fragile position of Malaysia's Tamil-speaking plantation labourer where the further marginalization of Tamil plantation women's voices is a product of a variety of factors, including gender and racial hierarchies of colonial plantations, the patriarchal set-up of Tamil society, and Malaysian post-colonial development that remains fraught with politics of race and ethnicity. These factors, discussed in detail later, shape frameworks of collective cultural memory where the voices of plantation women have lacked spaces of articulation.

This silence and obscurity also call for a reconsideration of Michel Rothberg's theorization of multidirectionality of memory which has long held sway in the field of Memory Studies.Footnote ¹⁹ According to Rothberg's somewhat idealistic conceptualization of memory, space that is not a zero sum struggle but a multidirectional space based on ‘ethics of comparison that can distinguish politically productive forms of memory from those that lead to competition, appropriation, and trivialization'.Footnote ²⁰ However, the continued obscurity of the plantation songs, brought about and kept in place by networks of institutional power and ideologies, reveal the competitive nature of memory field, where the amplification of some forms of memories entails suppression of the others; there are indeed ‘winners and losers'Footnote ²¹ as the articulation of one set of memories (the stories about the productivity of Malayan rubber plantations or the entrepreneurial spirit of the planters) suppresses the voice of the other (the suffering of the indentured labourers). Moreover, the Eurocentric focus of Rothberg's theorization conceals the racial and gendered modalities of experiences and memories, and the way in which these modalities shape the spaces of articulation.

The songs can be read within the framework of situational or fleeting forms of resistance and agency explored by Arunima Dutta in her 2021 study of Tamil plantation women of Malaya. Situational agency, Dutta explains, negotiates with the constraints and limitations on agency imposed by the material, social, and ideological structures within which the Tamil plantation women lived. According to Dutta, the plantation women as ‘producers and reproducers of labo[u]r, and despite being exploited, oppressed, and used by more powerful actors […] did not consent to be passive victims but exercised agency in navigating the complex dilemmas of plantation life in protean ways ranging from strategic compliance to armed resistance'.Footnote ²² The songs show the creativity and artistry that marks their resistance.Footnote ²³ It is markedly different from eventful acts of protest or disruption as it is situational or temporary and ‘invisible’, like the songs sung during the plantation work or domestic chores which have been overlooked by economic or even social historians. They exemplify the resistance and agency of the plantation women—often referred to as the ‘noise’ in colonial archivesFootnote ²⁴—and constitute the subtle ways in which they challenged the hierarchies of power. They are what James Scott refers to as ‘the weapons of the weak’: ‘[t]hey require little or no coordination or planning; they often represent a form of individual self-help; and they typically avoid any direct symbolic confrontation with authority or with elite norms'.Footnote ²⁵

The songs chosen for discussion in the sections below highlight the complexities underlying the plantation economy of Malaya where labour—physical and also affective and sexual—became a part of the exchange economy wherein the colonial planters, the middlemen, and the labourers occupied specific positions of domination and subordination. In the collective songs of migration and hardships, once can assume a collective ‘we’. In the songs in the later section, one hears the voices of women distinctly as not only expressing their anxieties and fears and but also exercising subtle forms of situational agency to negotiate with the frameworks of power that sought to constrain them.

‘We came to Malaya’

Migration from India to Malaya, particularly Tamil migration, predates British colonialism; it was a product of steady trade relations between peninsular India and various regions of southeast Asia. When the British consolidated their control of Malaya in the mid-nineteenth century, there was a significant presence of South Indians in Penang and Singapore.Footnote ²⁶ However, migration under the auspices of British rule was of an altogether different kind; it was a commercial enterprise meant to fulfil the labour requirements of the profitable sugar and rubber plantations and the tin mines. This requirement defined the scale and pace of colonial migration. In 1870, there were 30,000 Indians in Malaysia, mainly around Penang Island; by 1911, the number had increased to 275,000.Footnote ²⁷ Migration to Malaya was the major circuit of migration from colonial Madras (not Chennai) to the east, involving nearly four million journeys in all between 1840 and 1938.Footnote ²⁸ The songs give a glimpse of migration scenes during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

The song describes the scene of the migration journey. The turbulent waters reflect the turbulence of emotions—moving from optimism and anticipation of going to the ‘amazing’ rubber plantation where they have been promised relief from their suffering to their concern for people in India struggling with poverty, colonial exploitation, and rigid hierarchies of caste and traditions. The optimism is laced with anxiety as they recount the scenes they witnessed, for instance at the emigration depot.

The lines describe the scene at the Nagapattinam emigration depot in Tamil Nadu where the recruited labourers were confined before the journey, quite literally, by a wired fence.Footnote ³¹ At the end of a migration journey during which they had been subjected to the dehumanizing conditions of livestock, upon reaching Penang, their labour was eventually sold under contract to serve for a certain period.Footnote ³²

The recruitment of Tamil labour ranged from formal indenture contracts to debt bondage to kidnapping,Footnote ³³ despite the frequent attempts made by the authorities to establish consent as an important migration policy. But the archives of the court cases show deception at every level. The testimony of the labourers themselves held little value as Amrith cites the Tanjore District Collector's contention in 1873 that it was ‘useless to attempt to unravel the real facts of the case […] people themselves will not reveal the truth'.Footnote ³⁴ Eventually the issue of consent to migrate faded to the background based on the assumption that ‘the Indian coolie can be induced to say anything when he is brought before the Protector'.Footnote ³⁵ However, the plantation songs present another side of the picture which makes one wonder if the above dismissal was more of a convenience than an attempt at finding the truth:

The song mentions the wages that were promised and the process that induced the workers to migrate. There is a sense of resentment and disenchantment—paid just 60 cents (on paper, with wages being cut for the passage and for lost hours of work), the work was not so easy, and it was relentless and back-breaking. They lament their ‘little knowledge of the ways of the world’: as rural folk who had never ventured outside their villages, they boarded ships and sailed to the Malay country, trusting the words of the kangani or the middleman between the plantation owner and the recruits. In the songs, the kangani comes in for much abuse (as in the song above). The word ‘kangani’ is derived from the Tamil word kankani, referring to the foreman or the overseer.Footnote ³⁷ In the 1880s and 1890s, it was a common practice to recruit a coolie of some standing in the plantation with the task of recruiting labour from India. In other words, the kangani was the direct agent of the planter who would return to the district and ‘convince’ others to migrate to Malaya. Ultimately it was their belief in the kangani that compelled the labourers to arrive and trap themselves in the plantation. Kanganies also held the ability to determine the terms of a contract with the employees they hired.Footnote ³⁸ The kangani was also empowered to pay for the passage of the workers to Malaya—the workers were then supposed to pay him a percentage of their wages every payday. This often became a pretext for withholding workers’ compensation. Thus, while the system offered the planters an advantage in procuring labour easily, the once poorly paid coolie, now a kangani, preyed upon the most gullible and vulnerable in the community, luring them with false promises and making money from their misfortune. The workers were misled and disillusioned by the kanganis, who took advantage of their illiteracy and poverty, and led them to the plantations, in addition to the frustration and abuse they experienced at the hands of British officials. The system remained operational until 1938, and by then it had ‘produced a far greater flow and a more consistent supply of labour than that achieved under indenture'.Footnote ³⁹

The condition of the labourers in British Malaya, especially the high mortality rate, was another area of concern. While the archival sources detail the blame game played between the British authorities supervising the migration in India and those in Malaya, each accusing the other regarding the pathetic condition of the labour force,Footnote ⁴⁰ the songs give a glimpse of the stories behind statistics like the mortality rate of 70 per thousand in 1908 among labourers in the Malayan plantations.Footnote ⁴¹ Another song recounts this:

The excerpt highlights the disjunction between the harsh conditions, the physical injuries, and violence that most of the labourers experienced and the meagreness of the compensation paid for their labour. This is in stark contrast with the observations of the English planter. In his memoirs, Ainsworth, employed at a plantation a few miles outside Kuala Lumpur, notes that:

The contrast reveals the chasm between the two, in terms of understanding and privilege. Although they inhabited the same space of the plantation and recounted the same world, their individual experiences and memories are configured by their positionalities in terms of class, race, and, as we shall see in the next section, gender. The plantation narratives challenge the dominant accounts of British Malayan plantation at multiple levels. While the colonial archives record the wages paid to the workers, the English plantation manager expresses wonder at their not only being able to survive, but also managing to save. In a way, then, it becomes a justification for keeping the wages low. The songs, on the other hand, detail the harsh conditions in which the workers managed to survive. Therefore, the songs reveal the lived dimensions of colonial policies that shaped plantation life; juxtaposed with colonial memoirs they reveal the counter-memories that emerge from below, contesting and challenging colonial narratives directly.

Most of these songs are in the collective voice—we, the coolies going to work in the plantations. They include both men and women. Although no systematic count of South Asian women migrants in Malaya was made until the 1870s, between 11 and 15 per cent of annual arrivals were registered as female;Footnote ⁴⁴ their presence can be inferred from the scant statistics kept by the authorities for historical record keeping.Footnote ⁴⁵ Although initially women were considered unfit for work in the plantations,Footnote ⁴⁶ their numbers grew steadily because the global demand for rubber meant there was a greater requirement for labour, particularly for unskilled or semi-skilled tasks like clearing jungle, mowing grass, weeding, and cleaning.Footnote ⁴⁷ The presence of women in Malayan plantations, as Dutta notes, was a part of the ‘well-thought-out gendered labour policy to ensure that planters could employ more labouring hands for less cost, as women's labour was markedly cheaper than men's'.Footnote ⁴⁸ By 1911 women constituted 25 per cent of the coolies on Malayan rubber plantations, rising by 1931 to 39 per cent.Footnote ⁴⁹ Moreover, and perhaps more importantly, the purpose was reproductive and sexual labour. The presence of women was meant to ensure a steady supply of labour within Malaya thus cutting off or lessening dependency on India. Therefore, migration of women was meant to ensure both production and the reproduction of the labour force in Malaya that could resolve the labour shortage problem in the long term. Interestingly, the recruiter or the kangani was paid $3 dollars for recruiting each male and $3.5 dollars for each female.Footnote ⁵⁰ However, on the plantation women were paid significantly less since they were supposed to be the appendages to the male labourer.

But what made the women migrate? In her book Coolie Woman: The Odyssey of Indenture, Bahaduri mentions two major factors that led to women's migration—one was, escape: they had either been abandoned by their husbands and families or were widows. These women were seeking escape from the harsh and rigid social structure of India.Footnote ⁵¹ Secondly, she mentions coercion and kidnapping which, according to Bahaduri, was likely to have been the cause of her grandmother's migration from India to the Caribbean Islands.Footnote ⁵² A love song in Thandayutham's collection mentions the way some might have been lured:

Beneath the flirtatiousness of the song, one can read the gender dynamics of the relationship as the man asks the women for sexual favours (‘let us go to my hut’) by offering her the necessities that one might need to survive. Women, being few in number (although by 1900, a substantial number of women had migrated to Malaya), were subject to much jealousy and competition. The important theme in the above song is the integration of sexual intimacy within the exchange economy of the plantation. Within the plantation economy, sexual favours were repeatedly bargained for in exchange for gold or money, or even basic necessities like wheat flour or sugar. These oppressive conditions of the plantation affected women differently than men. They were paid much less than men which the colonial authorities justified in terms of their presence as surplus labour and also by citing their status as secondary workers in a household.Footnote ⁵⁴ The girl in the above song negotiates with the constraints imposed on her by the system; she rejects the man since he seems poor (he does not wear earrings or a fashionable shirt). Given the harsh conditions of exploitation and impoverishment in a set-up where her labour is underpaid and disposable, the girl's rejection can be read as a means used to safeguard herself and bargain for a better life. As the man vies for sexual favours, the woman exercises situational agency by choosing and rejecting partners. Bahaduri mentions that being away from the traditional confines of a rigid social structure in India gave women agency which they often exercised in terms of working on plantations, choosing their partners, or, if necessary, changing them.Footnote ⁵⁵ However, this choice remained circumscribed by the conditions of vulnerability and powerlessness. The next section of the article turns to the experiences and memories of women in the plantations as they negotiated their way through the highly organized and hierarchical space of the plantation.

In the estate: Memories and counter-memories

The British Malayan plantation was a highly organized space, geared to serve the global demands for rubber, or sugar, for maximal production and profit. Labour as well as land were important resources that were used with great diligence and effectiveness: ‘Under the new regime, plots had surveyed boundaries, titles, and rents, set by trading companies which saw land as a commercial commodity.’Footnote ⁵⁶ The plantations consisted of carefully divided plots of cultivation, living quarters—the planter's bungalow, the abode of the managerial class—and, finally, the labour quarters. In 1832, T. J. Neobold in his Political and Statistical Account of British Malayan agriculture and trade not only mentions the careful measurement and divisions of the land,Footnote ⁵⁷ he also notes the way this systematization of industrial agriculture brought about safety and progress.Footnote ⁵⁸ In the songs, this physical landscape of the plantation acquires affective dimensions as it becomes associated with fear, often accompanied by a sense of danger and anxiety. For instance, women feared the isolated plots of the land:

The song, with the title ‘Come fast’, talks about the travails of a woman named Veerayi.Footnote ⁶⁰ Like Veerayi, most of the plantation women struggled to manage work and childcare, while at the same time fending off unwanted sexual advances. The assignment of plots of land and trees to tap every morning is not just a regular day-to-day task. For the women, the day begins fraught with danger as they rush to avoid the kangani's scheme to isolate them from the menfolk or the other women. Women tend to stay close, avoid being late, leave off feeding children, in other words—avoid anything that would draw attention to themselves. The morning muster therefore acquires a sense of urgency and the lay of the land or the plots are not just about division of the task—they become pockets of safety and danger. One also sees women looking out for each other, issuing warnings, and, in general, trying to exert resistance by being in groups. Several songs mention the kangani who harassed and exploited the women sexually with false promises or offering easy work in plantations. Unlike the man in the previous song who tries to persuade the girl into an affair in exchange of some money, wheat, or sugar, the kangani assaults the woman, promising her gold bangles. The song shares the experience of fear and violence, and also serves to caution the listeners, the other vulnerable women.

Thus, the systematic organization of the plantation often became a means of systemic sexual exploitation. Women constantly negotiated through this dangerous sexual economy of the plantation in which they had little agency. Lees cites a case in Selangor Secretariat Files from 1885 where Mr McCarthy, a Selangor government tax collector, was dismissed after a Tamil named Ibrahim complained that his wife was living with Mr McCarthy until he repaid a loan of $20 dollars. After the investigation, it was found that McCarthy had given Ibrahim $20 to take Ibrahim's wife as his mistress. The British officials ordered the wife to be returned to Ibrahim. In this investigation, between Ibrahim's claim and McCarthy's defence, the wife in question remains unheard.Footnote ⁶¹

Similarly, Boulle recounts that it was a routine for the wife of the Tamil cook at the plantation to ‘alleviate the master's nervous irritation and bad humour by suggesting a simple material solution to the frenzied visions that disturbed his peace of mind in the night'.Footnote ⁶² All these euphemisms hint at the transgressions that frequently disturbed the hierarchical and racial boundaries of the plantation. The exchange of women reflected the hierarchy of men—in a British tax collector purchasing the wife of a labourer and a man ‘selling’ his wife. Women's silence was assumed to be a sign of their acquiescence.

In contrast to this silence, in the song ‘O my golden gem’ women describe their experiences when they are sent not to the far side of the plantation but to the dorai's (the English planter's) ‘bungalow’:

Woman's bodies, therefore, are constantly subjected to this assessing gaze. The ‘he’ in the song is ambiguous. As the above incident of Ibrahim and McCarthy shows, the body of the woman becomes central to the sexual economy of the plantation that is controlled by various men, including the planter, the kangani, and her fellow workers. The fleeing agency of women, as Dutta notes, oscillates between her agentic and victim identities, and at times, these are experienced simultaneously.Footnote ⁶⁴ Even as other women are warned, they have to deal with the situation every morning during muster.

Ainsworth, when recounting the sexual affairs of the planters and labour women, talks about a sense of servility peculiar to the Tamil community, an unnatural way in which Tamil men ingratiated themselves with their employers—‘just as the men of ancient times were said to have given their wives to a god who had a desire for mortal women'.Footnote ⁶⁵ The self-aggrandisement nevertheless illustrates the hierarchy of the plantation, with the English plantation manager claiming racial and class superiority, equating himself with ‘the god of the ancient times’. The willingness of the men to let go of their wives is taken to be an indicator of questionable Tamil morality. Arumugum and Thamburaj have used Tamil songs to point out the traumatic and depressing labour conditions that forced male workers in the plantations into maladaptive behaviour like drunkenness and violence.Footnote ⁶⁶ While such exchanges need to be contextualized within this power dynamic between the male planter and male labour, Pillai points out that despite the oppressive framework, male workers were still able to retain some form of agency within the domestic space: ‘while the male worker could discard his subaltern role at the doorway of his home, the woman did not share this privilege'.Footnote ⁶⁷ A woman's labour was double as she worked both in the field and within her home: ‘her body not only provided cheap labour for the plantation industry but also a sexual tool used by both the colonial Master and the male members of her own community'.Footnote ⁶⁸

So, in decrying the Tamil man's strange attitude towards women, Ainsworth fails to note his own complicity in this sexual economy that the plantation songs articulate emphatically.

The songs not only illustrate this subversive agency but the fact that they could be sung constitutes performative subversion. James Scott, who has studied the ‘weapons of the weak’ in the context of the Malaysian peasantry, insists on the hidden scripts of subversion that constantly challenge the public scripts of domination.Footnote ⁷⁰ Scott claims that the public script of the dominant group is often composed of a series of rationalizations that explain why they deserve to be in power, like Ainsworth's claim that Tamil men offered their wives to the ‘god-like’ Englishmen. To this, the subaltern responds by developing ‘hidden transcripts’ that convey their real attitude to power. Oral traditions and folk songs emerge as the weapons of the weak, bearing their hidden transcript that carry moments of subversion and even resistance. Amid the songs to be sung during weddings or the festivities and other such public events that celebrate the arrival and munificence of the planter (mainly an Englishman),Footnote ⁷¹ there are songs like these which would have been sung by the labourers within their community:

This hidden transcript of the subaltern, concealed within the boundaries of like-minded groups and in language that offers security (though some plantation officers understood and used Tamil)—creates a space of subversion within the highly organized, almost regimented, plantation life.

The political strength of narrative is its relative illegibility to the power group as the oppressed control the boundaries of articulation. The women's songs not only reveal these hidden transcripts of the subaltern but also reveal how they used the songs to express their agency, although it was fleeting and limited. In these songs, a woman raises her voice for her daughter against being beaten by the husband or she threatens to leave her husband if he does not give up alcohol. Anonymity offered by the collective narrative persona or the ‘we’ of the folk songs becomes an important feature as it allows women to articulate and affirm shared impressions. Given the harshness of their day-to-day lives, women, as Dutta claims, used the loopholes in the plantation and the legal system to exercise some modicum of choice:

Their songs are an account not only of their victimhood but also of fleeting moments of agency, and hidden transcripts of power and are, therefore, invaluable. The discourse of the songs, hidden within the confines of the plantation where they were the most marginalized and oppressed, expresses not only their hardships, but also the spirit of resistance against being confined to the margins or being obscured by a system that paid scant attention to their labour, even their presence in the plantation.

Literary representations in post-independence Malaysia

The above sections discussed the plantation songs in relation to the colonial accounts, personal as well as official. In this section, we would like to place these songs in the context of post-colonial Malaysia and its history, before going on to discuss their relative obscurity in Malaysia. The economic and developmental trajectory of post-independence Malaysia has, in many ways, retained its links with the colonial administration as a matter of policy. Jeyathurai notes that:

Hence, in post-colonial Malaysia, the plantation woman continues to be an enigmatic figure, characterized by silence and suffering, a victim who needs to be rescued. Jomo and Zaini's 1984 picture story, Meena: A Plantation Child Worker, produced by the Institute for Social Analysis in Malaysia (INSAN), is a humanitarian graphic novella based on a true story that surfaced out of research by INSAN, together with the Anti-Slavery Society in London. The graphic short story, aimed at increasing societal awareness of the brutalities of child labour, follows the Malaysian Indian estate girl through the hardships of her life: the day-to-day chores, sexual assault, and lack of opportunities. Published decades after independence, Meena's life continues to bear the imprints of the colonial plantation—the morning muster, the hardship, and poverty—so much so that the graphic novella seems to be a historical account of colonial Malaya rather than a true and contemporary depiction of estate labour. Meena, like the plantation women of the songs, continues to be the object of the kangani's gaze; the images depict her labouring body, working incessantly in the estate and at home—a solitary Malaysian Tamil plantation girl whose story ‘illuminates the dogged continuities of the colonial plantation economy in post-independence Malaysia and the position of labouring Indian women within that structure'.Footnote ⁷⁵ It ends on the note of never-changing tragedy: ‘here I lie on this piece of ground like my grandmother did. She came to work on this land. Grandmother worked her whole life, then she died. It will be the same for my mother. It will be the same for me.’Footnote ⁷⁶ These observations in the last panel of the graphic novella not only condense Meena's life: in this picture, Meena and her thoughts present a collective vision of a Malaysian Indian woman—suffering and toiling silently, hidden away in the plantation world that remains untouched by the change in governance.

The songs, on the other hand, contradict this unidimensional view of the Tamil plantation woman. Here, the women are articulate and often register protest. If not, they complain and threaten. In one of the songs in Thandayuthum's collection, a woman writes about her woes to her father back home:

The woman not only complains about her plight, but she also describes her alienation and how plantation life has altered her. She is hardened but not dispirited. The story of abject and silent victimhood belies the resourcefulness that one sees in the songs, alongside the hidden transcripts of resistance and subversion. Meena's silence and the conclusion of her story come from the stereotype of a Tamil plantation woman, and the persistence of the stereotype shows that the subjectivities of Tamil plantation women in post-colonial Malaysia continue to be narrated by others. One is left to wonder: why? We would like to conclude with some deliberations on the reasons why the memories of Tamil estate women and their lives are remembered by others while their own memories and experiences exist on the margins of the collective memory of the plantation communities and also of Malaysian history.

The politics of forgetting

This marginalization of the voices of Tamil plantation women and their memories leads one to revisit the theories of remembering and forgetting, especially those dealing with competitive or counter-memories, because as memory texts these songs are indeed contesting for space in the narratives of the past. If memory, as Rothberg claims, is the past made present,Footnote ⁷⁸ then the absence of these songs in the narratives of Tamil plantations indicates the absence of Tamil women, their past, and their experiences in Malaysia's present. This forgetting, at times voluntary and wilful, and at times, plain oversight, is a combination of various factors that link memory to gender, economics, and nation-making.

The first is linked to the marginalization of labour in an aggressively capitalist system like commercial agriculture. While the statistics on rubber production in Malaysia at the turn of the twentieth century or the production of palm oil or other such commodities are recorded and remembered, the labour involved in the process has been separated from the commodity. Connerton notes that ‘the modern world is the product of a gigantic process of labour, and the first thing to be forgotten is the labour process itself'.Footnote ⁷⁹ Connerton builds his argument on Marx's characterization of labour as ‘living, form-giving fire’, but commodity histories seldom recount the lives of the labourers.Footnote ⁸⁰ The tendency is even more evident where the commodity is produced under the aegis of colonial systems. The racial and gendered aspects of labour, as discussed above, are obliterated from accounts of economic production. Hence although the statistics and records of rubber production in Malaya inevitably bear the signature of the plantation labourer, including that of the Tamil plantation women, framed by the colonial capitalist systems of production, exchange, and consumption, labour is largely forgotten. The history of rubber production in Malaya, therefore, is unmarked by the travails of the men and women in the plantation. This amnesia is intensified further by labour's racial and gendered aspects—the memories of the plantation are often the memories of the Euro-American planters, managers, their remarkable achievements and profits, which were actually the product of the indentured Tamil labour on the plantation that included men and women.

This brings us to the second point, which is that the public transcripts of the colonial memory hold sway when it comes to the plantation narratives. These transcripts systematically discredited the possibilities of counter-memory. Ainsworth, describing the Tamil women on pay days in the plantation, stated: ‘I do not believe that any living being can make more noise than one Tamil woman who imagines she has been underpaid, and unjustly at that.’Footnote ⁸¹

Obscuring his inability to understand the language or the gravity of the issue for the women, Ainsworth relegates their lament to the category of ‘noise’; the sound imagery highlights the Tamil women's inferiority as articulate, rational beings. In such a scenario, it is hardly surprising that few, if any, could hear or comprehend the work songs as an expression of labour experiences. Labelled as noise, the songs become easy to discard from the historical archives. Furthermore, as the scholars from the emerging field of Sound Studies note, the characterization of the songs as ‘noise’ also leads one to reflect on the way oral archives are ‘imbricated with questions of power and practice, [that] can tell us about colonial operations'.Footnote ⁸² The characterization of the plantation labour as ‘noisy’, the obscurity of the songs as well as the lack of translations and research reflect the violence inherent in the archives of colonial and post-colonial memory.

Furthermore, the songs offer images of plantation women that are often at odds with the dominant discourses. Stereotyped as lazy, sensual, illiterate, and forever suffering makes it simpler to integrate the Malaysian Tamil woman into the dominant streams of collective memory—colonial and post-colonial—where she remains as ‘an “uncommemorated reminder” of the detritus of British colonialism in this former colony and the pitfalls of the kind of decolonization Malaysia experienced'.Footnote ⁸³ The conventional patriarchal set-up of the Tamil community ensures conformity: ‘members of Indian households are socialized into Indian beliefs, values, and traditions to enable them to assimilate into their society. Indian men are expected to be breadwinners, decision-makers and leaders, which indicates their higher position compared to women.’Footnote ⁸⁴ Women on the other hand, are expected to acquiesce silently. Lack of education, domestic violence, and poverty further intensify the silence.Footnote ⁸⁵ This is how the Malaysian Tamil woman then fits in and is represented by the dominant colonial and post-colonial discourses.

On the other hand, as an agentic subject, Tamil plantation women are problematic. In 2019, the government banned a Tamil novel named Peichi by M. Naveen. The novel is based on the lives of Tamil estate workers, especially women, their memories and resistance, as well as the difficulties they face in developing Malaysia. Due to charges of having ‘“pornographic” and “immoral”’ content, against ‘the traditional values and cultural norms of Malaysian society’, the novel, which details sexual abuse and domestic violence in the plantations, remains out of circulation in Malaysia.Footnote ⁸⁶ The discomfort caused by such narratives of agency and resistance has ensured that these accounts remain sidelined.

One also needs to consider the topography of memory—in a multicultural nation like Malaysia, although different memories constantly clash and subvert each other, they are circumscribed by the requirements of national history.Footnote ⁸⁷ The dominance of the Malay ethnic group as the ‘rightful heirs’ of post-colonial independent Malaysia and relegation of diasporic Indians and Chinese to splinter groups has led to the marginalization of diasporic memories and experiences in the national history. Memories and narratives of Tamil plantation women have little space in mainstream Malaysian history.

This is aggravated by language politics—Tamil, Mandarin, even English are categorized as sectional languages and literatures. While the existence of the songs in Tamil provided a means of creating and communicating hidden transcripts within the hierarchy of Malayan plantation, the status of Tamil language as a sectional language and literature in Malaysia and lack of state support is partly responsible for the forgetting. While Anglophone Malaysian Indian writing offers a robust scene, texts in Tamil often face difficult conditions. Without the support of the state and given the poor shape of the community, the Tamil literary sphere remains tied to India, specifically to the state of Tamil Nadu where Tamil is read and written. Much of Malaysian Tamil literature, including Thandayutham's collection of plantation songs, continues to be published in Tamil Nadu, India. Few, and mostly personal, efforts on the part of writers are made for translation or for wider dissemination.

Moreover, in a developing post-colonial nation, the trajectory of development is at odds with the time of memory. Among the new generations of plantation workers, there is a zeal to move forward, to grow—economically and socially.Footnote ⁸⁸ The memories of suffering and hardship as well as subversion and resistance in the plantations then become a clunky burden of the past. Being at one with the trajectory of the developing nation means leaving behind the memories that anchor one to the past.

Lastly, the changing nature of Malaysian plantations is also an issue. With the disappearance of old plantations, this geographical locus of memory is fading.Footnote ⁸⁹ The new plantations rely on irregular migrant labour from Thailand, Indonesia, and Bangladesh. They function on different terms and conditions, feasible according to new labour laws and policies. The children and families of the older Tamil plantation workers have either moved to urban Malaysia or are in the process of doing so. In about a generation or two, Tamil workers in the plantation will have become the people of history.

A careful consideration of these factors calls for revisiting Rothberg's theorization of memory space as a non-competitive multidirectional space. Memories exist, are disseminated, and heard or read in a circle where power and hegemony is implicit. And the modalities of gender and race in a given context are central to this process. Hence the space of memory, as the above discussion shows, emerges as a zero-sum game, where the result of memory conflict is indeed less memory.Footnote ⁹⁰ The songs reveal that in the colonial plantations built on the framework of commercial agriculture, collective memories do ‘work like real-estate development’ where the articulation on one side builds on the marginalization of the other.Footnote ⁹¹

The simultaneous existence and omission of the Tamil women's voices from the collective memory and history of the nation calls for a different theorization of multidirectionality which situates memory texts within the multidirectional histories of power. The trajectories of remembering and forgetting, or the condition of existence or non-existence of certain memory texts are shaped by these multidirectional networks of power. Acting within these networks, the subjects negotiate the means of articulation and agency which are situational or temporary. In such a scenario, to sing, to remember, and to pass on the memory in itself constitutes an act of resistance.