Introduction
The Periyar Community Service of Singapore is perhaps best known for its biennial memorials, the most recent of which took place in 2011.Footnote 1 Among the exhibits on display were rare photographs and speeches from Periyar E. V. Ramasamy's visits to Malaya.Footnote 2 The guest of honour was Dr K. Veeramani, president of the Dravida Kazhagam in Chennai, who stated in an interview that Periyar had dedicated his entire life to building an egalitarian society, the likes of which had apparently materialized in Singapore.Footnote 3 His tribute bore testament to British Malaya's prominence in the Self-Respect movement's history. Fundamentally, it raises the question of why the reform movement became relevant to a diasporic community struggling with the circumstances of its settlement.
The Self-Respect movement (cuyamariyātai iyakkam) originated in a milieu of acute political struggle with which it remained deeply concerned throughout its evolution, not just in the former Madras Presidency where it started, but also among Tamils living abroad in multiracial Malaya. Following his disillusionment with the Indian National Congress, Periyar started the movement in 1925, determined that there ought to be ‘no god; no religion; no Gandhi; no Congress; and no Brahmins’.Footnote 4 The anti-caste movement also demanded women's emancipation, deplored superstition, and emphasized rationality. Its iconic features included iconoclastic displays such as the public burning of Hindu scriptures and the controversial ‘reform wedding’.Footnote 5 Race was central to Self-Respect rhetoric, which argued that the non-Brahmin Dravidian people had been systematically subjugated by Aryan-Brahmins over the course of their long history.Footnote 6 Periyar condemned history as an agent of oppression, although Dravidian rhetoric simultaneously juxtaposed a purported glorious Tamil past against a present state of decline. Owing to the tremendous transformations that it wrought in South Indian politics and society, the Self-Respect movement has been interpreted largely as a regional phenomenon or anti-national menace, when its impact on overseas Tamil politicization was no less spectacular or significant.Footnote 7
M. S. S. Pandian has argued that ‘Periyar's views on nationhood ‘constantly violated the certitude about boundaries, identities, agents of change, and went beyond the territoriality of the nation’.Footnote 8 Nothing embodied the transnationalism embedded in Self-Respect as powerfully as the condition of being part of a diaspora. The ‘tradition of mobility’ underpinning the Tamil migrant experience presented the ultimate political critique.Footnote 9 Periyar argued that the Tamil people had fled to distant shores to escape caste oppression, which he alleged Gandhian nationalism had failed to ameliorate. His speeches and writings concurrently emphasized that foreign settlement could enable the regeneration of a Tamil society unfettered by the oppressive traditions of the Indian motherland.Footnote 10 Moreover, Periyar regarded overseas Tamil communities as an important source of moral and financial support for his movement. In fact, Self-Respect print propaganda was to be found far afield, having reached Ceylon, Burma, and Malaya before Periyar travelled there in 1929. In a letter to the newspaper, Kudi Arasu, in 1927, a Self-Respecter from Ipoh applauded the movement's success in Malaya on the basis that prayers for tῑmiti had been offered without Brahmin priests that year.Footnote 11 Another letter earnestly urged Tamils to boycott a Brahmin restaurant in Kuala Lumpur in protest against its discriminatory practices.Footnote 12 Just a month before Periyar's visit, a Kuala Lumpur magistrate's refusal to recognize a Tamil reform wedding had caused an uproar within the community.Footnote 13
Despite these encounters, the Self-Respect movement's political significance is notoriously under-represented in histories of Tamil public life in colonial Malaya and Singapore. Rajeswary Brown has argued that the movement was primarily ‘dedicated to moral, religious and social reform’, although she acknowledges that it became ‘increasingly political in character’ in the late 1930s,Footnote 14 while S. Arasaratnam suggests that the movement became politicized much later, after 1946.Footnote 15 In particular, Dinesh Sathisan and John Solomon have both produced rich analyses of the movement's impact on Tamil cultural consciousness and identity formation.Footnote 16 While this article concedes that Tamil press activism played an important role in propagating the movement's ideals, as Sathisan has pointed out, it cautions against viewing Malayan Self-Respect largely in terms of the ideological rivalry between the anti-Brahmin newspaper, Tamil Murasu and its Brahmin-owned nemesis, Tamil Nesan. Footnote 17 Instead, it calls for a reading of press reportage as a reflection of the mass mobilization that the movement inspired in Malaya. Solomon's work has demonstrated that Self-Respect constituted a platform through which the pan-Indian, elite character of Indian politics was gradually challenged and supplanted by assertions of Tamil cultural distinctiveness at the grassroots level. However, his argument that the movement was ‘imported’ into Malaya does not address its subsequent adaptation and ‘exportation’ back to the Tamil South.Footnote 18
While the reform movement left an indelible imprint on Tamil cultural assertion in Malaya, this article will argue that politicization was not a later development, as previous works have suggested, but was rather part of Self-Respect's Malayan experience from the very outset. The social mobilization that Self-Respect wrought was inextricably entwined with the political struggles embedded in the movement. Beginning with Periyar's visit in 1929, Self-Respect had an immense bearing on Malayan Tamil public life on many levels. First, it raised the issue of rights for marginalized segments within the Tamil community. Secondly, the movement's Malayan leaders sought political representation for Tamils as part of a wider Indian diaspora. Ultimately, Self-Respect raised important questions of loyalty as it implicated the diaspora in an emerging politics of belonging between Madras and Malaya.
Criticizing the dominant sociocultural orientation of diaspora studies, Sana Aiyar has argued that ‘in taking seriously the political ideas that emerge in diasporic contexts, we can create a paradigm for analysing diasporic politics that is located . . . within both the homeland that migrants leave and the host land where they arrive’.Footnote 19 In interwar Malaya, a nascent Tamil diasporic consciousness was greatly intensified by the Self-Respect movement, which provided an important fillip for the empowerment of the marginalized. If Periyar's movement had emerged amid the politics of non-Brahmin empowerment in the former Madras Presidency, it came to the defence of an immigrant minority community coming to terms with an acute sense of displacement in its settled country. Just as Gandhi's interactions with Indians in South Africa constituted the laboratory for satyagraha,Footnote 20 Periyar's movement mobilized—and polarized—Tamils in Malaya in the cause of ‘just war’ in South India. Periyar's brand of politics, like that of Jawaharlal Nehru or Subhas Chandra Bose, caught the attention of many in the diaspora as it actively encouraged a transnational political imaginary. Unlike Nehru and Bose, Periyar's movement was premised upon a particular regional sentiment, thus rendering Self-Respect's history in Malaya an important counterpoint to the vast majority of scholarly works which have emphasized the impact of mainstream Indian nationalism on the diaspora's politics. While the Self-Respect movement deliberately appealed to regional attachments, its co-optation by the Malayan Tamil middle class demonstrates that it could not be ‘easily bound within local, national or regional spaces’, as various layers of loyalty were prioritized in different configurations in line with the diaspora's changing circumstances.Footnote 21 The movement's evolution in Malaya distorts conventional representations of diasporic communities as rather passive recipients of political ideas transported from their country of origin. Instead, the series of negotiations that transpired during and in the decade following Periyar's visit demonstrate that the movement was transformed as it was shaped anew by its Malayan Tamil architects.
Positioning Self-Respect's reinvention in Malaya between 1929 and 1939 at the intersection of Arjun Appadurai's ethno, ideo, finance, and media ‘-scapes’, this study will examine the movement's adaptations and applications in the aid of the diaspora's language and culture in its two homes. The ensuing analysis offers, at one level, the story of a reform movement which originated in the Madras Presidency and became relevant in a different social context in Malaya. More broadly, the resultant exchanges and negotiations offer perspectives into the conditions under which diasporic consciousness is intensified and into the complexity of the ties that connect diasporic communities with their various worlds of belonging within a multiverse forged by empire. The following section will study the responses that Periyar's visit engendered among different segments of the Malayan Tamil public and the political significance of the events that took place during his stay. The last two sections will discuss the contentious loyalties that the movement inspired and their ramifications for Tamil notions of belonging in both the diaspora's ‘home’ and ‘host’ societies as the community came to terms with the turbulent 1930s.
Evoking Katherine Mayo and Mustapha Kamal Pasha: Malayan Tamil attitudes and approaches to Periyar's visit
Appadurai's argument that identities are forged within ‘imagined worlds’, in spaces that are ‘constituted by the historically situated imaginations of persons and groups spread around the globe’, complicates the nation-state's hegemony over identity formation and emphasizes instead the possibilities engendered by mobility.Footnote 22 Appadurai's critique thus offers a powerful lens through which to explore identities that are negotiated outside the fold of the nation-state, such as the dynamics of diasporic consciousness in colonies bound together by the experience of empire. In particular, his conceptualization of ‘-scapes’ as the foundation of group identities is helpful in examining the Self-Respect ‘community of sentiment’ that connected Tamils in British Malaya with their compatriots in the Madras Presidency.Footnote 23 The concept of the ‘ethnoscape’ is especially relevant to this analysis, as a diasporic minority community encountered a visiting reformer from the motherland and his radical brand of reform.Footnote 24 The interactions that followed exposed tensions in the diaspora's ‘ideoscape’, as the movement pitted subversive Dravidian attachments against loyalty to mainstream Gandhian nationalism.Footnote 25 Moreover, the shifting world of Malayan Tamils was constantly moulded by the ‘mediascape’ of the Self-Respect Tamil press. Spanning the Madras Presidency and Malaya, the circulation of publications like the Kudi Arasu newspaper provided ‘large and complex repertoires of images, narratives and “ethnoscapes”ʼ to audiences in both societies, which in turn shaped the diaspora's perceptions of its ideological and political landscapes.Footnote 26 Finally, Self-Respect reform also owed its transnational quality to the ‘financescape’ that was forged through the constant flow of funds connecting Malayan Tamils to the Tamil country.Footnote 27 The resultant intersections and disjunctures between these spheres wrought a tremendous transformation in the Tamil diaspora's view of its worlds, and of its place in them.
The Self-Respect movement became influential among Tamils in Malaya at a time when they were adjusting to the realities of becoming a diaspora—realities that prompted spirited debate within educated circles about the Tamils’ position in Malayan society. While migration and settlement had brought about Tamil numerical superiority within the Malayan Indian population, it seemed that there was no safety to be found in numbers. By the late 1920s, Tamil migration to Malaya was rapidly giving way to a permanent, settled community.Footnote 28 Sharp socioeconomic distinctions had emerged between Tamils from India, the majority of whom were impoverished, illiterate labourers from the Adi-Dravida castes, and Ceylon Tamils, many of whom found employment in the lower echelons of the civil service. Moreover, the perception that Indian Tamils were languishing while other settlers from the subcontinent were thriving had taken root among the Tamil middle class. After all, the earliest efforts to represent Malayan Indian interests had been initiated by the English-educated elites of the Ceylon Tamil, Bengali, and Malayalee communities.Footnote 29 Few Brahmins settled in Malaya's rural areas, yielding a ‘two-fold caste tier’ in which the Vellalar, Vanniyar, Nadar, and Goundar non-Brahmin communities claimed high caste status, while the ‘Untouchables’ remained untouchable.Footnote 30 However, despite the relative absence of Brahmins—and Periyar's expectations notwithstanding—life in Malaya did not yield a brave new world for Tamil settlers. Caste not only survived migration but became an integral part of the process itself, as non-Brahmin kanganis wielded control over the Adi-Dravida recruits in the plantations and endogamous transnational marriages persisted.Footnote 31 The extension of caste into Malaya entailed the encroachment of acute social inequalities as well. Patronised by wealthy non-Brahmin communities, several Hindu temples forbade entry to ‘Untouchables’, whose religious needs were served instead by shrines dedicated to Tamil village deities.Footnote 32
Along with the perception of serious internal inequalities, settlement brought with it the realization that Tamils, as a community, had been relegated to the bottom of Malaya's racial hierarchy. Sunil Amrith has argued that the colonial state's lack of differentiation between Tamil labourers and educated, middle-class Tamils contributed to a heightened sense of self-consciousness among the latter.Footnote 33 Influential English dailies frequently alluded to rampant alcoholism, poverty, and ‘backwardness’ as features of Tamil public life.Footnote 34 These reports, which caused great consternation for the leaders of the community, coincided with the emergence of a nativist discourse of rights that seemed imminently threatening to the Tamil identity. By the late 1920s, stirrings of Malay nationalism had motivated the establishment of numerous organizations, which denounced the migrant communities they deemed to be overrunning the country.Footnote 35 In response to these circumstances, members of the Tamil middle class spearheaded reform and representation for the community, for which similar endeavours in South India apparently offered the natural blueprint. As in the Madras Presidency, the 1920s witnessed the rapid development of Tamil associational life in Malaya. Unsurprisingly, Tamil urbanites were keen to encourage visits by Self-Respect leaders in the late 1920s. In November 1927, Periyar's older brother visited Malaya after repeated requests; two years later, Periyar himself was invited to strengthen the Self-Respect movement in British Malaya when his associate, N. P. Kaliappan, was there to collect royalties for the local distribution of Kudi Arasu.Footnote 36
On 15 December 1929, Periyar and his group set sail for Malaya from the port of Nagapattinam.Footnote 37 Large crowds gathered to welcome them in Penang and numerous Indian associations catered to the travellers’ needs throughout their month-long stay.Footnote 38 The prominence that Periyar's visit subsequently acquired cannot be discussed without reference to the Malayan English press, which contributed an important external dimension to the mediascape that Self-Respect spawned in Malaya. English newspapers provided detailed commentary on the leader's speeches and their local reception, with The Straits Times, for instance, stating that while Periyar had ‘incurred the hostility of high-caste Hindu opinion . . . there was no evidence of this among the crowds which gathered in Tank Road’.Footnote 39 Nearing the end of his visit, the newspaper quoted prominent satyagrahi,Footnote 40 N. Kesava Menon as stating that the ‘unfortunate controversies which arose regarding the visit of Mr. Ramasamy and his followers . . . had only enhanced the cause instead of endangering it’.Footnote 41
Indeed, resistance among high caste Hindus to Periyar's visit had almost prevented it from materializing. Prior to his departure, Periyar had received a telegram from Malaya alerting him to strong opposition in Penang to his visit. The Penang Gazette, whose chief editor was Brahmin, had tried to dissuade its readers from attending Periyar's speeches, while the Brahmin-owned Tamil Nesan had warned readers about the supposed dangers posed by the Self-Respect movement.Footnote 42 The Penang Hindu Society had even petitioned the Malayan government to forbid Periyar's visit, warning that he was a revolutionary who would sow discord among Malayan Indians if granted an audience.Footnote 43
Although Malayan authorities ultimately overturned the appeal, varying shades of resistance to Periyar and his movement persisted throughout his stay, underscoring the extent to which Self-Respect divided the local Tamil and Indian communities. During a meeting in Ipoh, the leader was deeply angered when a Malayalee told him not to discuss matters involving Kerala.Footnote 44 Even where opposition was not overt, segments of the Tamil community relentlessly negotiated the boundaries of discussion. Periyar had been cautioned against discussing matters of faith immediately upon his arrival in Penang.Footnote 45 In fact, leaders who spoke at Self-Respect meetings attempted to soften the movement's strident atheism to make it more palatable to Tamil sensibilities. A speaker in Selangor opined that there was nothing new about Self-Respect. According to him, the movement had been developed by numerous religionists before Periyar.Footnote 46 Presiding over a meeting in Malacca was Self-Respecter Kader Maideen, who condemned the Nesan for spreading ‘false propaganda’ about Periyar.Footnote 47 Quoting from the Qur’an, he declared the movement pro-Islamic and stated that Periyar had the full support of Malaya's Tamil Muslims.Footnote 48
S. Anandhi has argued that Self-Respect conferences in the Madras Presidency constituted important political sites for the movement.Footnote 49 Consisting of speeches and slogan-chanting processions, they opened up critical discursive spaces in which the aims of the movement were expounded, its supporters celebrated, and opponents attacked. The events that Periyar was invited to preside over in British Malaya were no less momentous. His visit not only attracted the attention of Tamils, ranging from teachers and journalists to labourers, but was also followed with some interest by members of other Indian communities. According to S. Chidambaranar, the visitors spoke at numerous conferences in the cities they visited and were kept busy with public meetings every day.Footnote 50 Prior to his departure from Madras, Periyar had promised his followers that he would refrain from broaching politics during his trip.Footnote 51 However, his Malayan message was nothing short of a political commentary. His speeches evidenced an international view of progress, scathing criticism of conditions in India, and concern for Indian rights in Malaya. While Periyar advanced a brand of modernity that frequently transcended political boundaries, the object of these efforts was always ‘local’, the parameters of which variously encompassed the Madras Presidency, India, and Malaya.
Moreover, the leader often made deliberate comparisons between Malayan Indian society and the land that the diaspora had left. During a speech in Singapore, he compared the Malayan Indian Association with the Indian National Congress during its infancy. He said that although the Congress Party had started out with the aim of helping the poor, it had eventually fallen prey to the personal ambitions of its elite leadership. As the audience cheered in agreement, he added that he worried that the Association might follow in the footsteps of the Congress, and ‘spoil this country like Malaya, cause difficulties to the poor here, and compel them to migrate again’.Footnote 52 The transnational outlook of the diaspora was referenced again in a meeting that discussed the importance of reform in light of Katherine Mayo's damning critique.Footnote 53 An audience member asked whether Mayo's views were acceptable, recalling Gandhi's comment that Mother India was a ‘drain inspector's report’, to which Periyar replied that it was a clarion call that Indian society was in dire need of cleaning.Footnote 54 Such exchanges constructed India as a site for social as well as political reform in Malaya, thus bridging the diaspora's worlds of belonging.Footnote 55
Periyar's audience echoed his preoccupation with progress as it intimately reflected their own concerns. Speaking in Ipoh, the president of the Tamils’ Conference likened Self-Respect's impact on Indian society to Mustapha Kamal Pasha's reforms in Turkey.Footnote 56 Such comparisons on the part of the Tamil leadership not only demonstrated a keen awareness of the realities of living abroad but, equally, evidenced a willingness to emulate foreign societies that they deemed to be modern and progressive. The Tamils’ Conference ended with the hoisting of the British flag, followed by the joint unveiling of a portrait of King George V and a photograph of Periyar.Footnote 57 As the event received widespread press coverage, the act was intended to establish the community's loyalties and position the question of reform for the Malayan Tamil community firmly within the ambit of politics.
Sanjay Chaturvedi has argued that exchanges between a diasporas’ home and host societies constitute ‘trans-border dissemination of discourses that define and defend bounded identities in terms of inside-outside, citizen-alien and self-other’.Footnote 58 Periyar's messages in Malaya often complicated these dichotomies and posited a fluid notion of belonging instead. He urged his audience to reflect on India from Malaya instead of thinking of returning to the homeland. He stated that since ‘as Indians, we are not in a position to claim that we are united in religion, caste, class, principle, or ambition’, Malayan Indians ought to ensure that their aims were unified in order to achieve parity with other communities.Footnote 59 As Fakhri has argued, this emphasis on pan-Indian solidarity in Malaya was at variance with Self-Respect rhetoric in the Madras Presidency, which had established the Dravidian racial and political identity on the basis of immutable difference.Footnote 60
By far the most overtly political act that occurred during Periyar's visit was the drafting of resolutions aimed at reforming various aspects of Malayan Indian society. The Tamils’ Conference in Ipoh endorsed the Sharada Child Marriage Restraint Act, which had been implemented in India earlier that year, for recommendation to the Malayan government. An informal decision was reached to legalize the remarriage of widows in the Federated Malay States, while the legitimacy of Self-Respect weddings was affirmed.Footnote 61 Moreover, the unity of the Tamil people was emphasized under the banner of the Tamil language. A second set of resolutions included an appeal to the Malayan government and high commissioner to repeal certain objectionable laws, one of which forbade non-European British subjects from entering the civil service.Footnote 62
Following a discussion of the resolutions that were signed during Periyar's visit, Amrith suggests that:
. . . in trying to foster a modern sense of citizenship amongst Tamil labourers in Malaya the Indian government and Tamil social reformers alike aimed to prise plantation labourers away from transnational affiliations of a much more local kind: the tight connections that plantation workers maintained with their home villages in South India.Footnote 63
It is questionable if Periyar and Malayan Self-Respecters harboured any illusion that such loyalties could actually be prised away. Parochial concerns and beliefs often surfaced, despite the movement's repeated emphasis on modernity and rationality. To cite an example, Periyar's memoirs recount that the labourers who gathered to see him often insisted on worshipping him as a holy man, to which he had to acquiesce at least once.Footnote 64 It may be more appropriate to interpret the events that transpired during Periyar's visit as attempts to foster an inclusive Tamil membership between Malaya and the Madras Presidency, one that would embrace parochial attachments along with broader national and transnational loyalties. The content of the resolutions and the act of drafting them in the presence of an ex-Congressman were aimed at demonstrating the community's ability to employ ‘modern’ forms of political participation, in language that nevertheless made frequent and deliberate recourse to primordial sentiments. The resolutions showed a determination to rally together in the interest of self-improvement and brought to the surface an underlying concern with negotiating the rights that accrued to Tamils as equal subjects under British rule. Self-Respect meetings and conferences enabled active dialogue between Periyar and the diaspora—dialogue which in turn wrought the movement's Malayan incarnation.
However, from the very outset, Periyar found that he was not entirely in control of his movements in Malaya as the crowds that gathered to see him often widened the margins of Self-Respect in their interpretations of the movement's meaning and purpose. Tamil responses to Periyar and early Self-Respect conferences were as varied as the cleavages that characterized their settlement in Malaya. While the reformer's visit in 1929 sowed the seeds for an invigorated interest in the Self-Respect movement among its supporters and detractors alike, its development over the next decade galvanized these differences and polarized the Tamil community even further.
The politics of reform in the aftermath of Periyar's visit
A diaspora is ‘not an issue of naturally felt roots but of specific political circumstances that suggest the mobilization of a transnational imagined community’.Footnote 65 In this regard, the 1930s marked a period of intense political change for Indians in Malaya as critical domestic developments were shaped and accelerated by external events that were no less remarkable in their impact. Growing disenchantment with the inadequacies of Malayan Indian representative organizations culminated in the establishment of the Central Indian Association of Malaya in 1936. This Association, which modelled itself after the Indian National Congress and was dominated by an English-educated North Indian and Malayalee elite, struggled in vain to win the support of Malaya's labouring Tamil masses.Footnote 66 In light of these circumstances, a dynamic and modern transnational Dravidian Tamil identity was fashioned by middle-class Tamils in Malaya with the active assistance of the movement's architects in the Indian South.
The plight of the South Indian labourer had become especially pitiful by the mid-1930s, prompting the Association's K. A. Neelakandha Aiyer to comment that ‘the only prospect he sees after he has given the labour of a lifetime is to die in the estate labour lines . . . Malaya too has no use for these “sucked oranges.”ʼFootnote 67 Escalating labour grievances coincided with two further visits by prominent Indian leaders to the country, with important implications for issues of belonging, representation, and reform. Hailed as ‘the greatest Indian to ever visit Malaya’, V. Srinivasa Sastri arrived in Penang in December 1936 amid great hopes that his visit would herald the betterment of Malayan Indian society.Footnote 68 While Sastri encouraged Indians in Malaya to become ‘citizens of this land in the completest sense of the word’, Nehru exhorted them to participate in the Indian national movement as ‘on India's freedom depend(ed) their status and the protection of their interests’.Footnote 69
However, even as Nehru advocated Indian solidarity in Malaya, serious tensions were building in the Madras Presidency. Emotions began to run high when the Congress government announced plans in 1937 to introduce compulsory Hindi language education in the state.Footnote 70 Following hundreds of protesters who were imprisoned on charges of sedition, Periyar himself courted arrest in December 1938.Footnote 71 The ensuing agitation culminated in the demand for the establishment of a nation that would encompass all of the Dravidian South. The first ‘Dravida Nadu Separation Day’ was inaugurated on 1 July 1939 in the Madras Presidency at a time when demands to claim Malaya for Malays were rapidly gaining momentum elsewhere in the British empire.Footnote 72
In response to these issues and challenges, the decade witnessed the rapid development of Malayan Indian associational life. Alongside other reformist endeavours, Self-Respect was enthusiastically applied to new opportunities that arose in Malaya as well as the Madras Presidency. Plans to establish a Malayan Self-Respect organization, which had begun in earnest in the immediate aftermath of Periyar's visit, culminated in the founding of the Tamil Reform Association in 1932.Footnote 73 With its headquarters in Singapore, the Tamil Reform Association sought to overcome the lack of representation for Malayan Tamils with a strong organization that would pave the way for progress and equality. Speaking at a preparatory meeting, entrepreneur O. Ramasamy Nadar emphasized the importance of proving wrong Malaya's North Indians and Ceylon Tamils whose attitude towards Tamil progress he deplored as one of condescension: ‘the Tamilian, the coolie, what can they do?’Footnote 74 The movement's next major initiative was to set up the Tamil Murasu, a Singapore-based Tamil newspaper that was motivated as much by the aim of propagating Self-Respect, as by the desire to break the near-monopoly that the Tamil Nesan wielded over Tamil public opinion.Footnote 75 The nexus that was thus established between press and associational life facilitated the dissemination of Self-Respect news among literate and illiterate segments of Malayan Tamil society. While it is difficult to ascertain the exact readership of the Murasu, it is clear that the newspaper enjoyed wide circulation within the peninsula. Sathisan points out that Tamil newspapers’ influence far exceeded the actual number of copies that were published as they were followed by a wide cross-section of Malayan Tamil society.Footnote 76 In fact, the Murasu was distributed at the nominal price of five cents to make it affordable for labourers.Footnote 77 The nexus that was thus established between press and associational life facilitated the dissemination of Self-Respect news among literate as well as illiterate segments of Malayan Tamil society.
Throughout the 1930s, Indian associations in Malaya frequently engaged with Self-Respect principles as they took up issues pertaining to the marginalization of Indian society and the urgency of reform. In April 1931, then-president of the Malaya Indian Conference, N. Kesava Menon, argued that Indians in Malaya were ‘getting bled and exploited’ and warned that ‘unless we stand united and acquire a thorough organization, we shall be crumbled to dust before long’.Footnote 78 The editor of the English daily that reported the speech was openly critical of the reformist language that characterized much of Malayan Self-Respect propaganda; he wrote that ‘thousands of other Indians have made comfortable livings . . . and ask nothing better than to be spared the attention of well-meaning busybodies who constantly urge them to “organize” and “assert” their rights’.Footnote 79 Yet, rallying Tamils to reclaim their rights was exactly what the Tamil Reform Association sought to do. A reform meeting in November 1936 emphasized that Self-Respect was concerned with progress and modernity for Malayan Tamils ‘just as they had . . . achieved in other countries’.Footnote 80 The leader of another meeting held in Singapore condemned the fatalism that he claimed had been instilled in Tamils by Aryan-Brahmin ‘puranic nonsense’.Footnote 81 He exhorted Malayan Tamils, whom he accused of being an apathetic lot, to take advantage of the Tamil Reform Association to improve their lives.Footnote 82
While the movement's influence was felt most strongly in Singapore, owing to the activism of the Tamil Reform Association and the Murasu, its aims were pursued by associations all over Malaya. During an anniversary meeting of the Taiping Adi-Dravida Mahajan Association in July 1930, a speaker declared that it was ‘because a movement had endeavoured to destroy the vile institution of caste in our Indian nation that we are forming like-minded associations there as well as here in this Malayan nation’.Footnote 83 Efforts to spread the movement's influence culminated in the establishment of a Tamil Reform Association branch in Malacca, for which monetary support was solicited from the Tamil public throughout the country.Footnote 84 Equally, these associations often demonstrated a commitment to assist their compatriots in the Tamil motherland. It was in this vein that a Hindu Youth Association in Malacca pledged to collect donations for the non-Brahmin movement in 1936.Footnote 85
Attempts to propagate Self-Respect were equally reflected in evaluations of the levels of progress that Malaya's other ethnic communities were deemed to have achieved. Reformist endeavours by the Chinese and Malays were closely studied, supporting Amrith's argument that Tamil consciousness in Malaya was shaped as much by the community's interactions with other diasporas as with its motherland.Footnote 86 As much as the social horizon of Malayan Tamils comprised memories, traditions, and ideologies carried over from the Tamil country, it was inflected by the diaspora's perception of its position relative to other ethnic groups, which it came to see as its co-inhabitants and competitors. It was in this spirit that certain practices of the other ethnic groups were lauded as progressive examples. A Murasu report of a cost-effective Chinese wedding that took place in Singapore in December 1936 marvelled that it had ‘no unnecessary ritual or rite’.Footnote 87 Another article cited a debate within the local Chinese community about reform weddings and argued that the majority of Chinese supported these weddings as they were reform-minded.Footnote 88 Moreover, Malayan Self-Respecters demonstrated a marked sensitivity towards external threats, both real and perceived, to the Tamils’ standing relative to their countrymen. A Tamil Reform Association meeting held in Malacca in April 1938 condemned an article that had been published in the Malaya Tribune earlier that month. It demanded—and eventually obtained—an apology from the newspaper's editors for publishing derogatory comments about the ‘Tamil race’.Footnote 89 To this extent, the Self-Respect movement spawned a mediascape in Malaya that was as defensive as it was proactive in identifying and overcoming obstacles to progress.
In the interest of representing the community, Malayan Self-Respecters took a firm stance on the issue of labour rights and needs. Attempts to restore the self-respect of the diaspora's marginalized majority took the form of organizing them and reporting news pertaining to labour welfare. As part of its three-year work plan, the Tamil Reform Association started a subcommittee with labourers to discuss their concerns.Footnote 90 A Murasu article in 1938 recommended that the only way to stop labour strikes was to heed labourers’ needs in advance, instead of scampering to rectify problems once they had arisen.Footnote 91 Hence, as in the Madras Presidency, the Self-Respect movement in Malaya encouraged the mobilization and empowerment of the most marginalized groups as the boundaries of the Tamil community were consciously and deliberately redrawn. The activities of associations supportive of the movement brought diverse social issues into the focus of reform to combat Tamil ‘backwardness’. Although it has been argued that the finer points of Self-Respect loyalties ‘had no relevance for the vast majority of Indian labourers’ owing to their illiteracy, the trope of the embattled labourer became central to the wider theme of displacement in the Malayan Self-Respect ideoscape.Footnote 92 In turn, Tamil labourers’ support for Gandhi and Nehru, along with their attendance at Self-Respect events, were congruous with Malayan efforts to reconcile seemingly contradictory positions in their ideological landscape.
Between Malaya and Madras: Self-Respect and issues of belonging in the Tamil diaspora
In the process of initiating reformist endeavours, Malayan Self-Respecters became critically concerned with establishing, negotiating, and contesting political loyalties over the course of the 1930s. The mobilization engendered by local adherence, adaptation, and resistance to the movement demonstrate that reformist concerns frequently overlapped with the realm of politics.
Meetings convened by the Tamil Reform Association and similar associations typically started by paying respect to the sultan, thus signalling their Malayan loyalties.Footnote 93 Moreover, the Self-Respect movement assumed a distinctly pro-British orientation. In May 1936, the Tamil Reform Association hosted visiting members of Tamilnadu's Karaikudi District Harijan Service Association, who deplored the fact that poor labourers returned to India from their toils in Malaya and Ceylon, only to be tortured anew by high caste Hindus. Significantly, they recounted having advised Karaikudi's ‘Untouchables’ that they need not fear oppression as they were equal subjects under British rule.Footnote 94 Prior to the Congress victory in Tamilnadu, the Murasu reported a speech by Periyar in which he declared that while British rule had ensured meritocracy, Gandhian independence would only institutionalize varnashrama dharma. Footnote 95 For its part, while the colonial administration was generally sympathetic to non-Brahminism and the Self-Respect movement in India, it demonstrated a marked lack of interest in the movement in Malaya, despite the many resolutions and petitions that were submitted to the government.Footnote 96
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Malayan Self-Respecters often upheld Periyar and his Justice Party as the true patrons of the Tamil language, culture, and people. The Murasu published a report of Periyar's 60th birthday celebrations during the leader's incarceration, in which it criticized those who questioned the motives of a Kannadiga Naicker serving Tamilnadu, arguing that Periyar had done more to further the Tamil cause than most Tamils ever would.Footnote 97 A meeting in Kuala Lumpur, which took place at the height of the anti-Hindi agitation, celebrated Periyar as the leader of the Tamil world.Footnote 98 Speakers emphasized that the leader was fighting to restore Tamil society to the ‘pinnacle’ of its former power, and concluded with an enumeration of the benefits that his Justice Party had yielded for non-Brahmins, as opposed to the evils of Congress rule.Footnote 99 However, as much as he was respected among Tamils in Malaya, Periyar did not command the unanimous loyalty that Self-Respecters tried hard to inculcate. During a Tamil Reform Association meeting in Singapore in 1937, a Self-Respecter complained that some Malayan Tamils were critical of the movement's relevance.Footnote 100 He pointed out that much of the ‘controversy’ stemmed from Periyar's association with the Justice Party, which, he argued, was merely a matter of political expediency. Recalling Nehru's recent visit to Malaya, another speaker said that the Congressman's criticisms of Periyar had sprung from a lack of awareness about the reformer's aims, as Self-Respect did not fundamentally diverge from Nehruvian principles.Footnote 101 A recurrent theme in Malayan Self-Respect propaganda was the notion that the Congress Party was opposed to reform. In December 1938, the Murasu published an article that castigated the omission in the Poona Agreement of separate electorates for the lowest castes and portrayed it as the Congress's ‘betrayal’ of the oppressed.Footnote 102 In the same vein, an editorial that reviewed chief minister, C. Rajagopalachariyar's policies charged his government with being a lackey of the Aryan North and given to authoritarian excesses.Footnote 103 His identity as an Iyengar Brahmin did not help matters either; the article argued that C. Rajagopalachariyar's ‘every policy (had) only benefitted Brahmins and the rich. The state of the poor (was) abysmal.’Footnote 104
Such attempts demonstrated an overriding concern with reconciling potential strands of conflict within the Malayan Self-Respect ideoscape.Footnote 105 The leaders of the Self-Respect movement in Malaya fully understood the sway that Gandhian nationalism held over much of the diaspora. Therefore, Malayan Self-Respecters focused their criticism on certain aspects of Congress misgovernance, such as the manifest ‘abuse’ of the Tamil people, while remaining respectful towards Gandhi and Nehru.Footnote 106 In fact, as Solomon has pointed out, it was not uncommon for Tamil labourers to profess loyalty to Periyar while adorning their homes and workplaces with images of Gandhi.Footnote 107 Efforts to balance admiration for key leaders in the Congress Party with adherence to Self-Respect values was a necessary compromise, as Malayan Self-Respecters sought to harness progressive elements in both brands of politics and the personal charisma of Gandhi and Periyar (who represented opposite ends of the ideological spectrum in the Tamil country) for the overriding purpose of achieving reform and progress for Tamils in Malaya.
As with the growth of Tamil revivalism in India, interest in expounding the glories of the Tamil language had been gaining momentum in Malaya throughout the decade. Speakers at a Tamil Reform Association meeting attributed caste inequalities in Madras to North Indian influence and asserted that ‘inequalities did not exist in the Tamilnadu of old’.Footnote 108 During a general meeting in Singapore, it was declared that ‘from the Himalayas to Cape Comorin’, all of India had once been unified under the Tamil flag.Footnote 109 Ideas of a powerful Tamil race or inam were also reflected in the construct of a global Tamil polity, defined chiefly in terms of a state of current weakness.Footnote 110 Articles about the unfair treatment of Tamils from Burma and Ceylon to Tamilnadu were commonplace in Malayan Tamil Self-Respect propaganda. In July 1938, a report condemned a Sinhalese newspaper for suggesting that the leaders of the country's Tamil minority were not truly representative of the community.Footnote 111 It posed a question that could equally have been asked of Malayan Tamil associations: ‘If the leaders who work hard to serve their people are not representative of the Tamil people, then we ask who are?’Footnote 112 Hence, the ethnoscape that the Self-Respect movement carved in Malaya encompassed not just Malayan Tamils and their attachments to the Tamil country, but also included a wider diaspora with whom they formed a ‘community of sentiment’ based on shared feelings of displacement and aspirations for empowerment.
Displays of the diaspora's commitment to restoring Tamil self-respect were manifested most evidently in efforts to coordinate Malayan Tamil resistance to the ‘imposition’ of Hindi in Tamilnadu. An editorial published in 1938 asserted that one could be loyal to India without swearing allegiance to an ‘alien’ language.Footnote 113 As an alternative to a Hindustan in which Hindi would forever reign supreme, Malayan Self-Respecters posited another nation at the heart of which was the Madras Presidency, flanked by the greater Tamil diaspora. In this imagined world, the Tamil language and culture enjoyed pride of place. It was in the spirit of achieving this ideal that the Selangor Maruthuvar Association of Kuala Lumpur passed a resolution demanding that the Tamilnadu Congress government replace compulsory Hindi education with legislation enforcing the mandatory study of Tamil instead.Footnote 114 A general meeting in Batu Pahat in July 1938 defined the anti-Hindi agitation as ‘a war for Tamil’, and emphasized that it was the foremost duty of every Tamil to destroy Hindi, just as it was the duty of every Malayan Tamil to aid the endeavour.Footnote 115 In fact, the meeting ended with the attendees pledging to donate part of their salary to the cause.Footnote 116 On 3 August 1938, the Selangor Tamil Teachers’ Association passed ten resolutions, one of which was to petition the Madras government to repeal the onerous language bill.Footnote 117 A week later, the Murasu published the names of 50 ‘Tamil patriots’ from Kuala Lumpur who had printed anti-Hindi pamphlets for local distribution and between them had raised $72.75 in donations, which they then remitted to Madras to support Hindi resistance efforts there.Footnote 118 The Self-Respect movement thus forged a vibrant financescape between Malaya and the Madras Presidency.Footnote 119
Just as donations were collected for the movement's development within the Malay peninsula, the diaspora demonstrated its resolve to defend its language and culture in its country of origin by sending hard-earned savings to aid fellow Dravidianists in the Tamil country. When appeals and petitions proved futile, Malayan Tamil volunteer brigades travelled to the Madras Presidency to participate in the protests. On 2 January 1939, a meeting in Singapore proposed to elect ‘a committee to represent Malaya, and through it to select youth with the determination to fight in Tamilnadu's war against Hindi’.Footnote 120 It expressed admiration for those who were undertaking the trip at their own expense and described their service as ‘satyagraha’.Footnote 121 In another meeting in Kuala Lumpur, a volunteer vowed not to return to Malaya until Hindi was ‘destroyed’ in Madras.Footnote 122 These flows of Self-Respect volunteers, donations to aid the movement, and coverage of these events by the Tamil press in Malaya together constituted dynamic public spheres that were inflected not just with the ‘woof of human motion’, but equally, of human emotion.Footnote 123
Developments in the Madras Presidency caught the imagination and led to the involvement of many in the diaspora as they constituted a frightening premonition of what might happen in Malaya in the near future, particularly in the wake of events that seemed inherently threatening to the Tamil position. By 1936, there were grave concerns that Tamil students lacked basic knowledge of their own language, owing to a severe lack of facilities and a widespread notion that Tamil language education was impractical in Malayan society.Footnote 124 In December that year, concerns about high rates of illiteracy among Indians had prompted the Malayan Indian correspondent of the Malacca Guardian to recommend the establishment of a board to oversee the management of Indo-English schools. More controversially, he had proposed that after being taught their respective mother tongue to an extent, ‘Hindi, the lingua franca of India, should be taught to all Indian children’.Footnote 125 Thus, the diaspora's efforts to defend the Tamil language in Madras were inspired as much by their determination to resist Hindi homogenization in the motherland as to prevent its encroachment in the guise of Indianization in its settled country, especially as political undercurrents claiming ‘Malaya for the Malays’ presented a further threat of homogenization.
However, notions of ‘home’ and ‘host’ countries were far from static among many in the Malayan Tamil community and wider Indian diaspora.Footnote 126 While some perceived developments in Madras as a reflection of their own fate in Malaya, others viewed the latter as their only home and were reluctant to participate in events that appeared distant and irrelevant. Employing Self-Respect rhetoric, an overseer of a mosque argued that Indians in Malaya should forsake ‘old prejudices of caste and religion, and birth’, and focus instead on developing ‘their capacities and the inherent powers of logic and forethought’.Footnote 127 Crucially, he added that Indians, particularly the wealthy, ‘should come to Malaya (and) adopt it as their own country’.Footnote 128 Articulations of a nascent national consciousness and xenophobia also began to emerge. Notably, these grievances pertained to educated Indian migrants overwhelming the Malayan labour market even as Malaya-born Tamils were struggling to make ends meet.
The development of the Self-Respect movement in the course of the 1930s recalls James Clifford's argument that ‘diasporic discourses reflect the sense of being part of an ongoing transnational network that includes the homeland not as something simply left behind, but as a place of attachment in a contrapuntal modernity’.Footnote 129 Whether it was defended as ‘just war’, or attacked as mere Self-Respect propaganda, Malayan Tamil involvement in the anti-Hindi protests betrayed a strong attachment to the affairs of the motherland. On the part of Malayan Self-Respecters, postulating a powerful Tamil civilization juxtaposed against a state of current decline established the community as one that was determined and prepared to fight for the Tamil motherland in the face of outsiders’ attempts to destroy it. The appropriation of symbols charged with nationalist meaning, such as ‘satyagraha’, legitimized the struggle to reinstate the Tamil position not just in the motherland, but equally in the diaspora's settled land. Those who criticized these efforts often did so on the basis that the Congress Party ought to be defended as the only viable political solution for India and, by extension, for Indian political participation in Malaya.
Conclusion
During his visit to Malaya in 1937, Jawaharlal Nehru remarked that Indians there were living in a ‘political backwater’.Footnote 130 More than 40 years later, Brown echoed much the same sentiment when she wrote that Indians in Malaya were ‘politically quiescent’ prior to 1945, and that the ‘few occasions when (they were) roused to political action were usually in response to initiatives from India rather than events in Malaya’.Footnote 131 Instead, as this study has proposed, the Self-Respect movement encouraged the Tamil diaspora's politicization from the outset around issues that were constructed as being antagonistic to the progress of Tamils in Malaya, as well as in Madras. The interactions through which the movement subsequently shaped, and was in turn shaped by, diasporic Tamil political consciousness highlight the community's Janus-faced orientation between Malaya and India as it negotiated its position as the majority within an immigrant ethnic minority.
Moving away from monolithic representations of diaspora, this study has argued that Tamil responses to the Self-Respect movement were varied and complex. The deterritorialization of Tamils from the Indian South, followed by their reterritorialization as British subjects in Malaya, introduced new anxieties and opportunities.Footnote 132 In this context, the Self-Respect movement opened up important public spheres wherein resolutions were drafted, policies were scrutinized, and Tamil representation was endorsed. Malayan Self-Respect institutions debated issues of political salience through the language of reform offered by the movement. On one level, the Self-Respect ethnoscape was the catalyst for the diaspora's politicization by enabling the exchanges that occurred during Periyar's visit. On another, it engendered the adaptation, extension, and exportation of the movement to the Madras Presidency, as Malayan Tamils travelled to defend Tamil in the motherland, thus bearing witness to the argument that transnational networks and movements ‘are not necessarily limited in time, unidirectional or impermanent’.Footnote 133 Ideologically, Self-Respect pitted Brahmin against non-Brahmin, and theist against atheist in Malaya, much as it did in India, but the movement's Malayan leadership and a wide cross-section of the Tamil public participated in the construction of a vibrant ideoscape that often redefined the movement's social and political parameters. A multitude of oft-contending political images and narratives pertaining to the relationship between the Dravidian movement and Gandhian nationalism in the Tamil country filtered through to Malayan Tamils through the vernacular press mediascape, which was shaped as much by Indian politics as by the community's interactions with the wider Malayan society.
Moreover, the movement provided a critical impetus for the subsequent development of Malayan Indian political life. Assertions of a Tamil political identity did not fade away with the anti-Hindi protests, but became central to allegations by the late 1940s that the Malayan Indian Congress, led by North Indians, did not care about Tamil rights. The ensuing agitation culminated in the Tamil Reform Association's demands for separate Tamil representation from 1948 onwards, prompting the Malayan Indian Congress's then-president, John Thivy, to deplore ‘Tamil parochialism’.Footnote 134 Its egalitarian rhetoric notwithstanding, there were limits to Self-Respect's inclusiveness in Malaya. As Solomon has argued, caste discrimination was a stark reality, even at the height of Self-Respect politicization.Footnote 135 In subsequent decades, Adi-Dravida exclusion became increasingly politicized, a trend that eventually culminated in the splintering of the Malayan Indian Congress and formation of the All-Malaysian Indian Progressive Front in the mid-1990s.Footnote 136 Be that as it may, few developments in the history of Indian settlement in Malaya fired the imagination of the Tamils as powerfully as their encounters with Periyar and the Dravidian Self-Respect movement.
