LSE - Small Logo
LSE - Small Logo

Sahil Bhagat

November 28th, 2024

The Plantation as Subject? Centring the Plantation within Malayan Anti-Colonial Histories

0 comments | 1 shares

Estimated reading time: 10 minutes

Sahil Bhagat

November 28th, 2024

The Plantation as Subject? Centring the Plantation within Malayan Anti-Colonial Histories

0 comments | 1 shares

Estimated reading time: 10 minutes

Plantations are not a figment of Malaysia’s pre-independence past but an industrial system that continually impacts the nation’s labour, economic and political landscape. Despite this, plantation experiences are normally excluded from narrations of Malaysia’s anti-colonial histories. This begs the question of what the region’s national histories would look like when written from the perceived ‘periphery’, writes Sahil Bhagat

_______________________________________________

The plantation occupies a unique space within colonial and nationalist historiography in Southeast Asia. The plantation industry has terraformed colonial Southeast Asia’s labour, economic, and industrial landscape, often serving as the primary setting for anti-colonial resistance movements. However, the plantation is simultaneously left to the periphery when narrating the region’s anti-colonial and nationalist histories, as elite urban actors are prioritised instead. Within the case of British Malaya, plantation-based anti-colonial movements deserve to be centred within Malaysian scholarship.

The plantation as a concept is almost abstract, without a specific definition. Western administrators, sailors and cartographers in Southeast Asia noted the prevalence of cash-crop estates producing gambier, pepper and nutmeg in Singapore before it acceded to formal British control in 1819. However, these pre-colonial estates do not equate to the colonial and post-colonial plantation industrial complexes, which completely terraformed the region’s labour, economic and political landscape. The formation of the plantation industry in Southeast Asia marked a significant turn away from mercantile trade towards a cash crop economy dedicated to producing goods such as rubber, coconut, sugar and palm oil. Within my Master’s dissertation, I focused on the experiences of plantation labourers, particularly Malayan Indian labourers who had been transported from the Indian subcontinent through the indenture and kangani labour systems to sustain the increasing demand for rubber from British Malaya. Particularly, I researched plantation resistance movements between 1930 to 1947, investigating how plantation-based communities expressed their political desires through their networks and built regional anticolonial movements.

Within my dissertation, the question arose of how the plantation ‘fit’ into the experiences of its labourers. Its abstractness as an institution impeded my ability to include it as an integral actor within labour-based resistance movements. Here I drew upon spatial theory as a method of theorising the plantation. Henri Lefebvre, in The Production of Space, argues that space is not inert but is alive, multilayered through lived experience, symbols, and sounds that are consistently reproduced (Lefebvre, 1974). Humans embed themselves into space but, at the same time, are equally influenced by the spaces they occupy. Space is fluid and interactive, constantly changing by those occupying it. Under this theoretical framework, I wrestled with the contradictory experiences of plantation labourers. While the plantation was constructed to extract as much productive capacity from its labour force as possible through isolation and segregation, these qualities of control were equally subverted by labourers who resisted the coercive capacity of the colonial estate system.

The primary inspiration for this paper came from scholarship on the Thondar Padai and the 1947 Kedah Strikes. Covered briefly in scholarship by Sunil Amrith, Carl Vadivella Belle, Tim Harper, and Christopher Bayly, the Thondar Padai represented a unique form of anti-colonial resistance amongst the diversity of actors in 1940s Malaya (Amrith 2013) (Belle, 2015) (Bayly and Harper, 2005). Roughly translated as The Self-Help Force or Volunteer Corp, the Thondar Padai were a self-organised group of predominantly Malayan Indian plantation labourers in the northern Malaysian state of Kedah, known for dressing in green uniform, performing military drills, and violently attacking alcohol stores with a religious duty to enforce temperance on the rubber estate. The uniqueness of the Thondar Padai stemmed from their unique form of political expression that did not neatly fit into the constructed categories of resistance. Embedded within Tamil cultural revivalism of the Dravidar Khazagam movement, armed anti-colonial resistance of the Indian National Army, labour activism within the Pan-Malayan Federation of Trade Unions, and Malayan nationalism, the Thondar Padai contradict the prevailing narratives of the Malaysian independence movement as dominated by competing and racially segregated actors (Nadaraja, 1981). Instead, the history of the Thondar Padai encourages scholars to view the political climate of 1940s Malaya as far more communicative (both within Malaya and regionally).

Thanks to the financial assistance of the SEAC Dissertation Fieldwork Grant and the Alliance Fellowship, my research took me to archives in the Malaysian states of Penang, Kedah and Kuala Lumpur, to Singapore and British archives in London and Whitehaven. These archival journeys took me to sources that highlighted how groups such as the Thondar Padai centralised plantation-based issues and resistance movements within debates over Malayan nationalism, drawing in diverse actors, regionally and locally, to form their own visions of a post-colonial Malayan future.

Formed almost immediately after the Second World War and the British re-occupation of the peninsula, the Thondar Padai were a product of decades of plantation-based activism. The primary object of the group was to eliminate the perceived ‘social ills’ of Tamil society, particularly alcoholism. Toddy was a popular palm wine consumed by estate populations, with high rates of addiction and abuse recorded since the early 20th century. Although dismissed by Malayan plantation managers and the colonial government as just a byproduct of the ‘promiscuous’ diet and lifestyle of the Tamil labourer, the social ills of toddy addiction and the desire to enact restrictive measures around its consumption by estate labourers were well-recorded (Federated States of Malaya, 1917). Toddy and the consumption of narcotics were not an exception to the Malayan Indian estate experience, as Evelyn Hu Dehart’s analysis of Chinese labourers on Cuban sugar estates in the 19th century demonstrates how the plantation industry existed in tandem with the narcotics trade (Hu Dehart, 2005). The abuse of alcohol, opium or other stimulants became a tool for labour control as its consumption was the only form of recreation that allowed labourers to endure the isolating and physically brutal effects of plantation labour.

This form of isolation came from the spatial organisation of the plantation. Estates were the size of small towns, constructed with dedicated “coolie lines” where labourers lived, slept and worked. These lines were consistently constructed far from neighbouring towns or roads and even segregated labourers of different ethnicities from one another. Labourers’ routines were dictated by the decisions of the estate manager, requiring each labourer to extract a certain amount of rubber to fulfil their quotas or risk losing their daily wage of 40-50 cents a day. Every aspect of their lives was surrounded by acres of rubber trees to be planted, tapped and extracted, and their livelihoods were determined by the (literal) weight of rubber tapped. Toddy became an industry whose production, distribution and revenues were controlled jointly by the plantation industry and the colonial government. Labourers became indebted to the estate as their daily consumption of toddy “dulled their senses and helped quench their desires for normal human needs” (Hu Dehart 2005, pp. 174-175). The plantation was spatially and socially organised to tie the labourer to the estate, either through debt, addiction, or social isolation.

However, the spatial organisation of the estate could equally be used to subvert the extractive and exploitative qualities of the industry. The segregated nature of estate planning meant that labourers could organise around communal lines or places of worship. Temples became primary meeting points for Thondar Padai members to practice military drills, educate fellow members about their cause, and coordinate strikes against the estate manager (Note the picture of the Sri Maha Muthu Mariamman Temple in Kedah, the supposed original meeting point of the Thondar Padai near the Harvard Estate in Photo 1). The size of the estate also meant that subversive goods and messages could be distributed to fellow estate members without much oversight. The plantation acted as an ecosystem that the colonial police, estate manager and government could not monitor continuously. This enabled labourers to hide strikers and agitators attempting to escape government purview after riots or police clashes. The immense land size and industrial capacity also meant that rubber production relied on its estate labour force to ensure that the plantation was self-sufficient with a regular supply of goods, could establish lines of communication with other estates, and transport managers and labourers easily.

Estate labourers involved within this supply chain, such as lorry drivers, became crucial to the expansion of the Thondar Padai from the Harvard estate to all major rubber-producing estates in southern Kedah. This movement enabled communication with local Indian representative organisations that sent Tamil-language anti-colonial pamphlets and textbooks for the education of estate children, recruitment for local Indian Independence League training schools, and collaboration with state and federal trade union organisations. These tactics culminated in the breakout of the 1947 Kedah Strikes, a series of estate strikes that exploded into a state-wide movement against police violence towards estate labourers protesting the prevalence of estate-run alcohol shops. The strikes in Kedah not only led to similar strikes breaking out in neighbouring states of Perak and Johore, but also led to the formation of a Board of Inquiry, signed by members of the Malay Nationalist Party (PKMM), the Pan-Malayan Federation of Trade Unions, the All-Malayan Rubber Workers Council, the Malayan Democratic Union, the Malayan Communist Party and the Malayan Indian Congress; demonstrating the heightening of localised estate related issues towards to national importance (Board of Inquiry, 1947). For labourers and nationalist actors, the plantation was not a mere by-product of colonial presence, nor a representation of the region’s industrial progress, but a symbol of an economic system built for the financial benefit of an elite minority. The Kedah Strikes became nationalised to argue the need for a postcolonial future that reformed the coercive power of the colonial plantation system.

However, writing in 2024, where Malaysian plantations, although under local ownership, still follow familiar colonial labour practices, raises the question of whether the Kedah strikers were successful in post-independence Malaysia. How far has the industry reformed from the predatory labour practices of the colonial era, in which debt bondage, forced labour, deforestation, and isolationist methods are still prevalent? My travels to the former Harvard Estate, the claimed original sight of the first Thondar Padai, highlighted that elements of the Thondar Padai spirit still remain. On the entrance of the road leading to the acres of land dedicated partly to the regimented planting of palm oil trees and partly to a Golf and Country Club stands the Sri Maha Muthu Mariamman Temple – a long concrete structure almost reminiscent of the traditional Malaysian balai (hall) within an open field and capable of serving a thousand people during Hindu festivals (pictured below).

Photo 1: Sri Maha Muthu Mariamman Temple, located near the former Harvard Estate, Kedah. Photo by and copyright of the Author.

 

A community member relayed its importance as a temple that served the Bedong plantation community for almost a hundred years. When asked about the Thondar Padai, the member looked at me with confusion as he proclaimed that the Thondar Padai was not an organisation of the past but one still present for the community. Claiming masih ada Thondar Padai (There still is a Thondar Padai), he recounted that community members regularly come to the temple grounds to clean, refurbish, paint and renovate when necessary. All community members are responsible for organising religious functions, communicating major news and uplifting fellow members. Thondar Padai is interpreted much more literally as a volunteer force, created to support the community without an explicit revolutionary or anti-colonial aim. It is a spirit deeply connected to a sense of place and belonging, in which the temple stands as a marker of the Bedong plantation community’s past. In an era where Malaysian Indians face discrimination and ‘loyalties’ need to be proven, the plantation symbolises a sense of belonging for Malaysian Indians to mark their legacy as builders of the nation’s industrial past.

 

 

______________________________________________

*Banner photo by and copyright of the Author.

*About the research: This blog is based on the Author’s dissertation for his Master’s degree in International and World History from Columbia University and the LSE, for which the Author was awarded SEAC’s Dissertation Fieldwork Grant.

*The views expressed in the blog are those of the authors alone. They do not reflect the position of the Saw Swee Hock Southeast Asia Centre, nor that of the London School of Economics and Political Science.

About the author

Sahil Bhagat

Sahil Bhagat completed his joint Master’s degree in International and World History from Columbia University and the LSE, supervised by Professor Natasha Lightfoot and Professor Kirsten Schulze in July 2024. Before LSE, he obtained an MA in International Relations and Modern History from the University of St Andrews. His research concerns the labour, migration, and spatial histories of colonial Southeast Asian plantations, focusing on British Malaya. Currently, he is a Research Associate at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore.

Posted In: Graduate Student Research

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.