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Indian Society of Malaysia and Its Leaders: Trends in Leadership and Ideology among Malaysian Indians, 1945–60

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 April 2011

S. Arasaratnam
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Extract

Within the plural society of Malaysia, Indians reflect a pluralism every bit as complex and resulting in problems that are a smaller version of those faced by the nation. Indian society is segmented on a variety of grounds, each segment operating with its own autonomy and yet entering into a competitive coexistence with others to impose its interests as the dominant ones of “the Indian community” of Malaysia. These inner strains and stresses among groups struggling to assert community leadership have a long history and proceed from a background of economic, social, and cultural factors that have characterized Indian migration and settlement in peninsular Malaya. It is the aim of this paper to look at these segments of Indian society, the kinds of leadership they produced, the interactions of that leadership among each other for a period of about fifteen years after 1945. An attempt is made to isolate a number of the major groups and segments of society, to categorize the types of leaders emerging among them, to note the links between these leadership types and thus provide a profile of the society's leaders in this period.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Southeast Asian Studies , Volume 13 , Issue 2 , September 1982 , pp. 236 - 251
Copyright
Copyright © The National University of Singapore 1982

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References

This paper was presented at the Eighth Conference of the International Association of Historians of Asia, Kuala Lumpur, Aug. 1980. I am grateful to the University of New England for financial support to attend this Conference. I have benefited from discussions following this presentation and some of the ideas have proved useful in revising the paper for publication.

1 Only in the widest possible definition of the term “community” could we call the Malaysian Indians a community. In the political and social context of Malaysia, the Indians were pressured to look upon themselves as a community and other ethnic groups did look upon them in this way. For the sake of convenience, I have used the term “Indian community” when I refer to all Indians who have migrated to Malaya from the Indian subcontinent. When referring to various subgroups of the migrant Indians, I have been more precise.

2 All population statistics as from Tufo, M.V. del, Malaya: A Report on the 1947 Census of Population (London, 1949)Google Scholar; and Fell, H., 1957 Population Census of the Federation of Malaya, Report No. 14 (Kuala Lumpur, 1960)Google Scholar.

3 M.V. del Tufo, Malaya: A Report on the 1947 Census of Population, pp. 92, 95 and Tables 52, 69.

4 Tiravita Muracu (Tamil), 1 Mar. 1948.

5 Handbook of Rubber Statistics 1952 (Alor Star, 1953), Table 28 and pp. 79–82.

6 There is little study of this interesting merchant caste in Malaysia. Some start has been made in Kratoska, Paul M., The Chettiar and the Yeoman. British Cultural Categories and Rural Indebtedness in Malaya (Singapore, 1975)Google Scholar.

7 Indian Daily Mail, 29 Sept. 1947.

8 Stenson, M., Industrial Conflict in Malaya (Kuala Lumpur, 1970), pp. 25–33Google Scholar.

9 Ibid., pp. 49–50. Jain, R.K., “Leadership and Authority in a Plantation: A Case Study of Indians in Malaya (c. 1900–42)”, in Leadership and Authority, ed. Wijeyewardena, G. (Singapore, 1968), pp. 168–70Google Scholar.

10 Jain, R.K., South Indians on the Plantation Frontier in Malaya (Kuala Lumpur, 1970), pp. 322–31Google Scholar.

11 Federation of Malaya. Annual Report on Education 1949 (Kuala Lumpur).

12 Jain, South Indians, pp. 295–331 and passim.

13 For terms of this agreement, see Gamba, C., The National Union of Plantation Workers (Singapore, 1962), pp. 112–13Google Scholar.

14 Estate Management and Officers of the Department of Labour were commenting on this in the mid-1950s. See, for example, Federation of Malaya. Monthly Report of Labour Department, June 1956, p. 13.

15 Thivy papers in the University of Malaya Library.

16 One of the distinguished leaders and spokesmen of the professional class, R. Ramani, made a strong assertion to this effect in his memorandum to the Cheeseman Committee on Constitutional Proposals. Report of the Consultative Committee on the Constitutional Proposals, 21 Mar. 1947, p. 24.

17 Indian Daily Mail 24 June 1949, 27 June 1949, 29 June 1949, 11 July 1949.

18 Tiravita Muracu, 1 Jan. 1948; Indian Daily Mail, 29 Sept. 1949.

19 Glick, Clarence, “Leaders of Indian Origin in Kuala Lumpur”, Proceedings of the First International Conference Seminar of Tamil Studies, Vol. 1 (Kuala Lumpur, 1968), pp. 227–41Google Scholar.

20 Federation of Malaya. Annual Report on Education (Kuala Lumpur). Relevant years.

21 Palaniappan, M., “The Young Men's Indian Association and the Indians of Kuala Lumpur, Malaya 1945–55”, Proceedings of the First International Conference Seminar of Tamil Studies, Vol. 1 (Kuala Lumpur, 1968), pp. 209–17Google Scholar.

22 For an excellent description of the diversity of Malaysian Hindu practice, see Aveling, Marian, “Ritual Change in the Hindu Temples of Penang”, Contributions to Indian Society (NS), 12, 2 (1978): 174–93Google Scholar.

23 For the debate between traditionalists and modernists, see Arasaratnam, S., “Social Reform and Reformist Pressure Groups among the Indians of Malaya and Singapore”, Journal of the Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society XL, 2 (1967): 59–62Google Scholar.