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Songs of Tamil plantation women of Malaya: Contesting memories and histories
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 February 2025
Abstract
This article is an outcome of a search for the Tamil plantation woman in Malaysia and her voice—her stories and memories, in her own words. Through the plantation songs of Tamil workers in Malaysia, first collated and published in the 1980s, we explore the experiences and memories of these women, singing about their lives and work in the Malayan plantations. As memory-work, these songs constitute an oral history that provides an uneasy counter to hegemonic discourses like that of the colonial planters who employed the women, or the nationalist historiography of India and Malaysia where they are sidelined and reduced to figures of abject victimhood in the clutches of colonial capitalism, or the post-colonial discourse where their memories and experiences constitute a shameful past that obstructs optimism for the future. Tamil plantation songs call for a comparative approach to history and memory—between the position of the woman and that of the man, or the labourer and the supervisor/planter, as well as more problematic and shifting positionalities like seducer and the seduced, or the victim and the perpetrator.
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- © The Author(s), 2025. Published by Cambridge University Press.
References
1 K. S. Maniam, Between Lives (New Delhi: Penguin, 2003), p. 3.
2 The agricultural land that the old woman owns is coveted by the state for development of a theme park and a condominium complex.
3 The B40 category refers the ‘bottom 40 percent’ of the population with a monthly household income of RM3, 855. R. Rokisa, ‘Social Enterprising Observance among B40 Urban Women for Socioeconomic Sustainability’, European Journal of Sustainable Development, vol. 8, no. 5, 2018, pp. 397–408.
4 For a representation of Malaysian historiography, see Shanthini Pillai, ‘In Gendered Chambers: The Figure of the Indian Immigrant Woman of Colonial Malaya’, Hecate, vol. 30, no. 1, 2004. Charu Gupta has discussed the complicated representations of the indentured woman in the Hindi Vernacular sphere in North India. Gupta insists that ‘the moralizing discursive practices of certain Hindi writers on the subject suggested serious attempts to rescue, rehabilitate, improve, discipline, control, police, and condemn the subaltern indentured woman—all of which unveiled a tangle of arguments of national honour, women's chastity and respectability, manual labour, sexual anxieties, notions of morality and immorality, citizenship, and “sorry” sisterhood. Her simultaneous representation as an “innocent” victim and also as a “guilty” migrant construed her as both part of the nation and outside it’: Charu Gupta, ‘“Innocent” Victims/“Guilty” Migrants: Hindi Public Sphere, Caste and Indentured Women in Colonial North India’, Modern Asian Studies, vol. 49, no. 5, 2015, pp. 1345–1674, at p. 1346.
5 According to Gupta, ‘the alleged immoralities, obscene behavio[u]r, and lack of shame among emigrant women posed a serious threat to the moralities of middle-class, upper-caste reformers, and spread anxiety and panic among them, not least among the women’: Charu Gupta, The Gender of Caste (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2016), p. 255. It resulted in similar anxieties in the migrant Tamil community as traditional, patriarchal Tamil society was challenged by migration which led to the loosening of its structures. Rahim notes newspaper headlines like ‘Woman's Dual Life’, ‘Wife's Infidelity’, ‘Two Deaths over Woman’, ‘Ashamed of Wife's Infidelity: Municipal Coolie's Reason for Committing Suicide’, ‘Outraged Husband. Ten Years for Killing His Unfaithful Wife’, ‘Tamil Customs. Correcting an Erring Wife’ which point to the moral laxity and shame associated with the figure of the woman who migrated. Al-Mehraaj Binte Mohamed Rahim, ‘The History of Tamil Women in Malaya and Singapore (1870s–1900s)’, Master's thesis, Nanyang Technological University, 2023; available at: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/173595, [accessed 28 January 2025].
6 Arunima Dutta, Fleeting Agencies: A Social History of Indian Coolie Women in British Malaya (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021).
7 Leopold Ainsworth, The Confessions of a Planter in Malaya: A Chronicle of Life and Adventure in the Jungle (London: Witherby, 1933); Pierre Boulle, Sacrilege in Malaya (London: Secker and Warburg, 1959).
8 Murasu Nedumaran, ‘Preface’, in R. Thandayutham, Malēciya nãttuppurap pãtalakal (Chennai: Tamil Putaagalaiyam, 1998), p. vi. Apart from Thandayutham, Murasu Nedumaran also documented some songs which he has presented along with his research, in Murasu Nedumaran, Malēciyāṭ tamiḻ kavitaik kalaṉciyam (Klang: Arulmathiyam Publications, 1997).
9 This is the primary reason for the interpretive approach to the songs which is supplemented by the literary sources and other qualitative research. Given this limitation, it is difficult to record the performance, conventions associated with the performance, and so on.
10 Ved Prakash Vatuk, ‘Protest Songs of East Indians in British Guiana’, The Journal of American Folklore, vol. 77, no. 305, 1964, pp. 220–235.
11 Devika Singh Shekhawat, ‘Encountering the Digital in Folk Songs and Oral History: Tracing the History and Memory of Migration of Tea Plantation Labour Through Jhumur Songs’, in Literary Cultures and Digital Humanities in India, (eds) Nishat Zaidi and A. Sean Pue (New Delhi: Routledge India, 2022), pp. 344–360.
12 Peter Manuel, ‘The Trajectories of Transplants: Singing Alhā, “Birhā”, and the Rāmāyan in the Indic Caribbean’, Asian Music, vol. 43, 2012, pp. 115–154.
13 Vijaya Ramasamy, ‘Women and Farm Work in Tamil Folk Songs’, Social Scientist, vol. 21, no. 9/11, 1993, p. 114.
14 Ibid., p. 115.
15 Kingston P. Thamburaj and L. Arumugum, ‘Historical Background of Malaysian Tamil Folk Songs’, Time and Mind, vol. 15, no. 1, 2022, pp. 41–66; Shanthini Pillai, ‘Transnational Collaboration and Media Industry in South India: Case of the Malaysian—Indian Diaspora’, in The Political Economy of South Asian Diaspora (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), pp. 187–203.
16 Lynn Hollen Lees, Planting Empire, Cultivating Subjects (London: Cambridge University Press, 2017), p. 59.
17 Vandana Saxena, ‘Carnivalesque Memoryscapes of Multiculturalism’, Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, vol. 63, no. 1, 2022, pp. 28–41.
18 The scant academic exploration of plantation songs has been done mostly by Tamil academics and has been published in Tamil. Logeswary Arumugum and P. T. Thamburaj, ‘Maladaptive Behaviour of the Tamil Labourers during the British Colonisation as Reflected in Malaysian Tamil Folk Song’, Imperial Journal of Interdisciplinary Research, vol. 3, no. 5, 2017, pp. 1327–1330; Logeswary Arunamugum, ‘Trauma of Tamil Labourers during British Colonisation in Malaya as Reflected in Malaysian Tamil Folk Songs’, Master's thesis, Sultan Idris Education University, 2017.
19 Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009).
20 Ibid., p. 18.
21 Ibid., p. 3.
22 Dutta, Fleeting Agencies, p. 2.
23 Ibid., p. 3.
24 Consider the discussion on Leopold Ainsworth's account of the noisiness of Tamil woman below. Ainsworth, Confessions, pp. 61–64.
25 James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (Yale: Yale University Press, 1985), p. 29.
26 K. Anbalakan, ‘The New Economic Policy and Further Marginalisation of the Indians’, Kajian Malaysia, vol. 21, no. 1, 2003; P. S. Gopal and P. Karupiah, ‘Indian Diaspora and Urban Poverty: A Malaysian Perspective’, Diaspora Studies, vol. 6, no. 2, 2013.
27 J. R. Innes, Report on the Census of the Straits Settlements taken on the 1st March 1901 (Singapore, 1901); A. M. Pountney, The Census of the Federated Malay States, 1911 (London, 1911). Quoted in Sunil Amrith, ‘Indians Overseas? Governing Tamil Migration to Malaya 1870–1941’, Past and Present, no. 208, 2010, p. 235.
28 Amrith, ‘Indians Overseas?’, p. 235.
29 Thandayutham, Malēciya nãttuppurap pãtalakal, p. 5. Shanthini Pillai, a prominent Malaysian scholar has noted how Tamil songs that originated in India were modified and adapted to integrate the experiences of the migrants with the homeland. The songs reflect the process of becoming diasporic both in their form as well as content—names, places, and contexts are changed, but the rhythm and meter of the original ensemble from Tamil Nadu is present in the background. According to Pilliai, these changes trace the ‘evolution of the immigrant psyche from its retention of the original form to its integration of the local landscape and finally the disappearance of the ancestral land from the horizon and the focus on local issues; in short, reflections of the changing periphery and centre’: Pillai, ‘In Gendered Chambers’, p. 150.
30 Thandayutham, Malēciya nãttuppurap pãtalakal, p. 7.
31 Another song mentions the condition of confinement explicitly:
‘kampi valaikkul kalankip pulampukirom
ayyo amma enru’
In the wired net, we lament
In pain, O mother! (Ibid., p. 290.)
32 Sunaina Pathania, ‘India's Indentured Labour Migration to Malaya: A Historical Study’, International Journal of Social Science and Economic Research, vol. 3, no. 4, pp. 1217–1226.
33 K. S. Sandhu, Indians in Malaya: Some Aspects of their Immigration and Settlement (1786–1957) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), p. 79.
34 Amrith, ‘Indians Overseas?’, p. 236.
35 Ibid.
36 Thandayutham, Malēciya nãttuppurap pãtalakal, p. 6.
37 P. C Jain, ‘Exploitation and Reproduction of Migrant Indian Labour in Colonial Guyana and Malaysia’, Journal of Contemporary Asia, vol. 18, no. 2, 1988, pp. 189–206; A. Kaur. ‘Indian Labour, Labour Standards, and Workers’ Health in Burma and Malaya, 1900–1940’, Modern Asian Studies, vol. 40, no. 2, 2006, pp. 425–475.
38 S. S. Kumar, ‘The Kangany System in the Plantations of South India: A Study in the Colonial Mode of Production’, in Proceedings of the Indian History Congress, no. 49, 1988, pp. 516–519; R. K. Jain, ‘Tamilian Labour and Malayan Plantations, 1840–1938’, Economic and Political Weekly, vol. 28, no. 43, 1993, pp. 2363–2370.
39 Carl Vadevella Belle, Tragic Orphans: Indians in Malaysia (Singapore: ISEAS, 2015), p. 107.
40 The planters laid the blame on the fact that the labourers arrived in a poor state of health and therefore could not adapt to the conditions in Malaya. On the Indian side, officials blamed their ill-usage and harsh conditions in Malayan plantations. Lees, Planting Empire, pp. 52, 76.
41 K. K. Liew, ‘Planters, Estate Health and Malaria in British Malaya (1900–1940)’, Journal of the Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, no. 83, 2010, p. 97.
42 Murasu Nedumaran, cited by Arunamugum, Trauma of Tamil Labourers, p. 77.
43 Ainsworth, Confessions, pp. 56–57.
44 Lees, Planting Empire, p. 79.
45 J. Hagan and A. Wells. ‘The British and Rubber in Malaya, c.1890–1940’, The Past Is Before Us: Proceedings of the Ninth National Labour History Conference ASSLH, 2005, pp. 143–150; K. S. Sandhu and A. Mani, Indian Communities in Southeast Asia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); S. Nanjundan, Indians in Malayan Economy (New Delhi: The Manager of Publications, 1950).
46 Pillai, ‘In Gendered Chambers’, p. 62.
47 R. Kurian, ‘The Industrial Plantation under Colonialism in South Asia: Finance Capital Price Takers and Labour Regimes’. Paper presented at the Workshop on Colonial Agricultural Modernities, 1750s–1870s: Capital, Concepts, Circulations, Berlin, Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, 22 and 23 March 2018; S. M. Lee, ‘Female Immigrants and Labor in Colonial Malaya: 1860–1947’, International Migration Review, vol. 23, no. 2, 1989, pp. 309–331; K. S. Sandhu and A. Mani, Indian Communities in Southeast Asia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
48 Dutta, Fleeting Agencies, p. 10.
49 Immigration of Indian Labour (1928, WOMEN'S HISTORY REVIEW 599 1931, 1947) (Kuala Lumpur: Government Print Office), Arkib Negara, 1957/0474571.
50 Dutta, Fleeting Agencies, p. 39.
51 G. Bahaduri, Coolie Woman: The Odyssey of Indenture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014).
52 Ibid., p. 73.
53 Thandayutham, Malēciya nãttuppurap pãtalakal, p. 85.
54 Dutta, Fleeting Agencies, p. 59.
55 Bahaduri, Coolie Woman, p. 235.
56 Lees, Planting Empire, p. 21.
57 T. J. Neobold, Political and Statistical Account of British Settlements in the Straits of Malacca (London: John Murray, 1839), vol. 2, p. 27.
58 Ibid., pp. 23, 28.
59 Thandayutham, Malēciya nãttuppurap pãtalakal, pp. 57–58.
60 Ainsworth and Boulle mention that most of the Tamil women were called either Muniamma or Poonamma. However, these names in the songs show that they might have been used as a strategy to escape attention. Ainsworth, Confessions, p. 63; Boulle, Sacrilege, p. 127.
61 Lees, Planting Empire, pp. 81–82.
62 Boulle, Sacrilege, p. 137.
63 Thandayutham, Malēciya nãttuppurap pãtalakal, p. 62.
64 Dutta, Fleeting Agencies, p. 17.
65 Ainsworth, Confessions, p. 72.
66 Arumugum and Thamburaj, ‘Maladaptive Behaviour’.
67 Pillai, ‘In Gendered Chambers’, p. 144.
68 Ibid., p. 142.
69 Thandayutham, Malēciya nãttuppurap pãtalakal, p. 242.
70 James Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990).
71 Thandayutham, Malēciya nãttuppurap pãtalakal, pp. 220, 36.
72 R. Alagappan, Nattupurap pattalkal (Chennai: Monark Printers, 2009), cited by Arunamugam, Trauma of Tamil Labourers, p. 70.
73 Dutta, Fleeting Agencies, p. 17.
74 Dashini Jeyathurai, ‘Labouring Bodies, Labouring Histories: The Malaysian-Indian Estate Girl’, The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, vol. 47, no. 3, 2012, p. 305.
75 Ibid., p. 310.
76 K. S. Jomo and J. Zaini, Meena: A Plantation Child Worker (Kuala Lumpur: INSAN, 1984), p. 21.
77 Thandayutham, Malēciya nãttuppurap pãtalakal, p. 9.
78 ‘Not strictly separable from either history or representation, memory nonetheless captures simultaneously the individual, embodied, and lived side as well as the collective social and constructed side of our relations to the past. Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory, p. 204.
79 P. Connerton, How Modernity Forgets (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), p. 42.
80 K. Marx, in Marx-Engels Selected Works (Eng. trans., London, 1951), cited in ibid., p. 41.
81 Ainsworth, Confessions, p. 64.
82 Philip Burnett, Erin Johnson-Williams and Yvonne Liao, ‘Music, Empire, Colonialism: Sounding the Archives’, Postcolonial Studies, vol. 26, no. 3, 2023, p. 346.
83 Jeyathurai, ‘Labouring Bodies’, p. 304.
84 N. G. Saigaran, ‘Impoverishment of Malaysian Indian Women: A Capability Approach Perspective’, in A Kaleidoscope of Malaysian Indian Women's Lived Experiences, (eds) P. Karupiah and J. L. Fernandez (Springer: Singapore, 2022), p. 87.
85 Ibid.; N. G. Saigaran and A. B. Bada, ‘Perceptions of Malaysian Indian Women of Domestic Violence in Malaysia: A Peek into the Indian Households’, Kajian Malaysia, vol. 41, no. 2, 2023, pp. 173–194; N. G. Saigaran and S. Thambiah, ‘Malaysian Indian Women's Education and Their Marginalisation: An Intersectional Analysis’, in Malaysian Indians and Education: Reimagined Development Opportunities, (eds) R. Nagappan and H. Mukherjee (London: Routledge, 2022), pp. 100–119.
86 Revathi Durai, ‘Peichi; Home Ministry Bans M Navin's Novel on the Pretext of “Pornographic” Elements’, Varnam Malaysia, 29 December 2020; available at: https://varnam.my/36,394/peichi-home-ministry-bans-m-navins-novel-on-the-pretext-of-pornographic-elements/, [accessed 27 January 2025].
87 Vandana Saxena, ‘The Carnivalesque Memoryscapes of Multiculturalism’, Critique: Journal of Contemporary Fiction, vol. 62, no. 2, 2022; Vandana Saxena, Memory and Nation-building (London: Routledge, 2022).
88 K. Chakraborty, S. Thambiah and J. Arumugam, ‘Children and Young People's Emotions of Migration across Asia’, Children's Geographies, vol. 16, no. 6, 2018. pp. 583–590.
89 Frances Yates highlights how place or the loci of images is central to the act of remembering. An idea or a thing is remembered in a specific context, in a specific place. As the older plantations fade away, so do the memories associated with them. Frances A. Yates, The Art of Memory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966).
90 Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory, p. 14.
91 Ibid., p. 2.