The sensitive Indian 1: The result of decreasing ignorance - Rama Ramanathan

We were living in government quarters. I was a boy, still in primary school. There was a knock on the front door. I rushed to see who it was. The visitor was the resident watchman at the Chinese school. I yelled to my mother, in Tamil, “The Chinese School Bengali is here.”

My mother came to the door. She said, to me in Malay, “Don’t be rude! You should say (Chinese School) Bhai!” She apologized to Mr Singh. “He’s just a boy.” Mr Singh, clearly not wanting to miss the opportunity to make a point, said “Where did he learn to say Bengali?”

I saw that look on my mother’s face and that stiffness of bearing. I knew not to ask her anything about what just happened. I didn’t want to be scolded for speaking back to her. I didn’t even ask my father that evening. I didn’t ask my sisters or my brother. I just thought “life is so unfair. They can always say Bengali when they speak about him, but they don’t let me call him Bengali.”

Over 45 years later, I learned why Tamil, Telugu and Malayalee Indians in Malaysia called Sikhs Bengalis.

I learned it through reading Kernial Singh Sandhu’s book, Indians in Malaya: Some Aspects of their Immigration & Settlement, 1786 – 1957, published by Cambridge University Press in 1969. Sandhu based his book on the dissertation he submitted to the University of London for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.

Our Indian elders in Malaysia only told us stories about their villages and their relatives.

Their stories were set in small parts of India – which to them was India. I suspect they didn’t know how vast and varied the country was. I suspect they didn’t even know how many states there were in India, let alone a state called Punjab. I suspect they’d never met Bengalis or Punjabis before arriving in Malaya.

Which brings me back to the Chinese School Bhai. He, like most other Sikhs in Malaysia, was from Punjab, not Bengal. Calling him a Bengali was like calling a Turk an Arab: annoying! [Did you know that Kamal Ataturk made Turks give up their Arab names?

Why do/did many Malaysians call Punjabis Bengalis?

Well, it’s because unlike most Indians who boarded ships for Malaysia in Nagapattinam and Madras in the state of Tamil Nadu, the Punjabis boarded ships in Calcutta, in the state of Bengal. This was the logic: “They came from Bengal; they must be Bengalis.”

Malaysia being my homeland, I had grown up thinking that all Punjabis are Sikhs, and that anyone whose name includes Singh is a Sikh, a (religious) follower of the teachings of Guru Nanak. After all, every Singh I knew in Malaysia was a Sikh. It was only in my thirties that I learned it is not so.

In India, there are many Punjabis who are not Sikhs! There are many Singhs who are not Sikhs!

I began with the story of the visit of the Chinese School Bhai to demonstrate the depths of my ignorance. I believe the same can be said about other Malaysians, including those of Indian origin. Our ignorance extends to other aspects about the history of Indians in Malaysia.

Hindraf, the Hindu Rights Action Force, which changed the face of Malaysian politics through the rally it organized in Kuala Lumpur in 2007, can claim a great success with respect to me and other Malaysians of Indian origin: it sensitized us to our ignorance of our own history.

Hindraf shamed us.

Hindraf caused us to seek to understand our history and to consider what a renewed understanding of our ancestors might mean to our response to government policies.

Hindraf made us wonder whether Malaysian Indians should be compared to slaves in the United States. Consider this description of the lot of the Indian labourer:

“The lot of the Indian indentured labourers varied from employer to employer; but it was generally hard, often indescribably so.

We have already noted how many of the employers appear to have worked on the principle of maintaining their workers at as small a cost as possible, of working them as hard as possible and of keeping them on the job as regularly as possible, if need be by force or flogging.

Nine to ten hours per day, six days a week was the normal load of work.

Those who had signed legal contracts were bound to these conditions for varying periods ranging from 313 to 940 days of work.

In practice these were liable to be extended for an indefinite period.

For one thing, through illness mainly, it was seldom that the Indian labourer was able to work for more than twenty days a month.

For another, he had to make up for lost time for days spent attending court, in prison, absence without permission and absence through sickness, in excess of thirty days per year.

He was also under obligation to continue to work until any sums due to the employer in repayment of advances and so on were paid.

Finally, until 1862 when it was abolished, a ‘joint and several’ contract appears to have been customary; under this all the labourers of a gang signed a contract rendering each of them liable for the default of any of the others – even to the extent of making ‘one man in a hundred work out the defaults of ninety-nine absconders.’

In short, employers had considerable means of extending the labourer’s period of indenture, and many of them appear to have exercised these.

It was seldom that such a labourer secured his release at the end of three years. Then, too, there was the possibility of the employer trying to re-indenture or renew the agreement for another stretch if the worker was still productive.” (Sandhu 1969, page 83).

At a time when so many government-aided FELDA settlers and come-lately Indonesians are prospering – just look at the cars, the clothes and the kenduris – we look at the state of so many Indians whose ancestors worked the land for generations in such abject conditions.

We ask: “Why is it that when we hear ‘Indian’ we think ‘gangster’? What did we fail to do that resulted in this state of affairs? What did we tolerate that resulted in this state of affairs? What should we start doing?”

Some answer: We must see every action through a racial lens. We must make a big fuss, every time, because that’s the only way to get the government’s attention, as Umno/Perkasa and Hindraf have shown us.

Others say we must shift the focus of public policies from race and history to human rights and better policing – by civil society – of government policies and implementation.

Malaysian Indians have become very, very sensitive since Hindraf emerged. More to come..

This is a follow-up to my post, Naming the three Elephants in Seri Pristana.

* Rama Ramanathan reads The Malaysian Insider.