1.2 Origin of Indians in Malaya
The Indian presence in Malaya2 dates from the first century AD, beginning with the coming of Indian traders, military conquerors and Hindu/Buddhist cultural influence (or Indianisation) in the northern region of the Malay Peninsula.3 Archaeological and historical evidence of Hindu/Buddhist relics and temple ruins showed that the early Malay Kingdom of Kadaram, located in the present-day state of Kedah was subject to eleventh-century conquests from the Chola Dynasty of the Coromandel Coast of Southern India.4 Despite the Indianisation of early Malay royal culture and local Malay customs, the Indians themselves were passing through to reach other dominions in Southeast Asia. Indian presence was again apparent in the fifteenth-century port of Malacca, which was a trade hub for Indian merchants. Most of the Indian traders were transitory, but a few settled down with local Malays and assimilated into Malay culture forming the hybrid (peranakan) Malacca Chitty community.5 However, early Indians in Malaya were mostly sojourners and are not the forefathers of contemporary Indians in Malaysia.
The modern Indians in Malaysia are mostly descendants of the citizens of British India and British Ceylon who came to Malaya during the nineteenth-century British colonial rule. The late 1800s has been recorded as an intense period of Indian labour migration from British India to her other colonies such as Guyana and Trinidad in the British Caribbean islands, Ceylon (Sri Lanka) and Mauritius in the Indian sub-continent, as well as the Straits Settlements (Malaya) and Burma in Southeast Asia.6 The colossal movement of Indian labour across the colonies was due to the high demand for cheap labour to work in the agricultural plantations of tea, coffee, sugar cane and rubber. The rapid development of the industrial revolution and production of goods in Britain had propelled a rising need for inexpensive raw materials. At the same time, British humanitarian lobbyists had placed political pressure on the British parliament which led to the termination of the old system of slavery. Hence, the high demands of industry and the search for inexpensive labour required a ‘new system of slavery’, which was obtained from cheap and compliant labour from British India.7 The British colonial government in India (also known as the British Raj) set up an Indian labour policy and an immigrant control system with stringent requirements to ensure the transportation of a submissive Indian labour force.8 India had a large populace which was acclimatised to an orthodox Hindu social system, that is, the hierarchical caste system that created a ready pool of agricultural workers.9 The living and work conditions were already severe and harsh for India’s landless peasants; hence, many were willing and able to migrate to the other colonies in search of better prospects. The concern of British colonial capitalists and planters was not only in obtaining cheap agricultural labour but also in ensuring an obedient and complacent workforce. The British planters who ran the plantations in Malaya found the ‘subordinate class’ of Indians to be fitting for this role, and the rigid caste system would ensure minimal risk of a peasant revolt which could destabilise the colonial plantation economy.10
Suitable plantation labour was specifically chosen from the state of Tamil Nadu (‘Tamil land’) where the British Madras Presidency held its office in India. In fact, the migration of the Indian Tamil people to Malaya has been historically documented as a crucial component of the colonial rubber economy.11 The Tamils are an ethno-linguistic people who speak the Tamil language and practice what is known as the Dravida (South Indian) Tamil culture. During the British occupation of Tamil Nadu, severe bouts of droughts had rendered many of the landless peasants jobless, in serious debt and in dire need of new economic opportunities. Furthermore, the lower-caste landless peasants were hoping to escape exploitation by upper-caste landlords under the Indian bonded labour system.12 The British were familiar with Tamil peasant labour who were first brought into British Ceylon in the 1800s to work in the coffee plantations and in the 1900s for tea cultivation.13 The flow of Indian Tamil landless peasants to Ceylon in the beginning was almost unrestricted, but by the 1830s, the British Raj enacted the Indian Immigration Ordinances which began regulating the indentured and contractual terms of labour. The Indian Tamils were a migrant labour group who were kept spatially and socially separate from the native Ceylon Tamils.14 The separation of these two Tamil sub-groups created a caste/class wedge and proved to be a useful arrangement for the control of Indian Tamil plantation labour and Ceylon Tamil administrative staff under the British Ceylon administration. Hence, the Indian Tamil peasantry provided the right type of wage labour for the development of rubber, while the division of labour in British Ceylon was easily replicated in the rubber plantations of Malaya. The 1884 Indian Immigration Ordinance shifted the control of Indian labour emigration from the British Raj to the Straits Settlements Government (Malaya), while the 1908 Tamil Immigration Fund Ordinance (re-enacted as the 1910 Indian Immigration Fund) was passed in order to sponsor and support the importation of Indian Tamil labour into Malaya.
The British planters in Malaya purportedly found the Indian Tamil labourers to be weak in morale, fearful of authority and in servile gratitude to the British planters.15 The British planters’ preference for Indian Tamil peasants particularly from low-caste groups, which included a small percentage from the Outcastes or Untouchables group, meant that a majority of the Indians who migrated to Malaya from the 1900s to 1945 were Indian Tamils as plantation labour. By the 1920s, 90% of the Indians in Malaya were said to be members of the Indian Tamil ethno-linguistic group.16 However, a small number of Tamils were also brought from the Jaffna province of British Ceylon, while other non-Tamil South Indians were transported from the Indian states of Kerala and Andhra Pradesh, in order to fulfil the need for clerical and administrative staff in the British Malayan government and rubber plantations.17 These migrants were chosen for their level of education, ability to speak English and prior work experience as low-ranking administrators under the British Raj. Other Indians who came into Malaya included the Sikhs from the state of Punjab, who were recruited by the British administration as military, police and security personnel.18 At the same time, a handful of self-sponsored free migrants also came into Malaya on their own accord for purposes of trade and employment. The free migrants were mostly Indian Muslims (including Tamil and Malabar/Kerala Muslims) and North Indians such as the Gujaratis, Sindhis and Bengalis.19 Another group which came from Tamil Nadu but as self-sponsored migrants were the Tamils of the Natukottai Chettiar caste, usually pegged as traders, merchants, moneylenders, bankers and landowners.20 However, due to caste cleavages, the Indian Tamil Chettiars did not mingle or associate with the Indian Tamil plantation labour. The bulk of the Indian free migrants were a crucial component of an emerging urban Indian middle class. In essence, the origin of modern Indians in Malaya shows extreme diversity in terms of their ethno-cultural identity. The only thread that linked these various groups was that they came from the Indian sub-continent and thus were somehow ‘Indians’.
1.3 Horizontal and vertical cleavages among Indians in Malaya
The sheer diversity of the Indians who came into Malaya resulted in a hyper-diverse group that experienced horizontal (ethnic, linguistic, religious, regional and cultural) and vertical (caste, class and socioeconomic status) cleavages. Despite the diversity of Indians, the British colonial administration attempted to racialise the group in order to differentiate the Indians from other ethno-cultural groups such as the Chinese and the Malays.
1.3.1 Horizontal ethno-cultural diversity of Indians
In the latest population census of 2010, Indians comprised 7.3% of the Malaysian population, while the main ethno-linguistic sub-group were the Tamils, accounting for 80% of the Indians in Malaysia.21 The Indian category in current census data consists of the majority Tamils and pockets of ethno-linguistic and regional sub-minorities such as the Malayalis, Telugus, Punjabis, Bengalis, Gujaratis, Sindhis, Oriya as well as Ceylon Sinhalese and Ceylon Tamils. The 2010 census also found that 6.3% of the Malaysian population wer...
