Indian's History in Malaysia

The Dawn of the 20th Century

As the model Ts rolled out of Ford’s plant in the early 20th century, the need for 'white gold' to make tyres soared. The tropical Malay Peninsula turned out to have an ideal climate for growing rubber. Three decades earlier, sapling had been nurtured in the Britain from Brazilian seeds. These productive strums flourished in Malaya, forerunner of modern Malaysia, and the number of plantations mushroomed. By 1924, when the 1o millionth Ford hit the road, Malaya was exporting more than 200,000 tones of rubber annually -more than half of total world output.

Image by R Shanmuga Sundaram

The sudden proliferation of rubber plantation created a dire shortage of labour. Migrants from India started flooding in to Malaya – both were British colonies – to fill the void. Earlier, a mix of people from different parts of India had come to the Malaya peninsula as traders, moneylenders, railroad builders, sugar plantation workers and clerks in the colonial regime. But the newest arrivals were mainly Tamils from South India. About 1.2 million of them came to Malaya in the first four decades of the 20th century.

Stenson in his book quotes an European, describing the Indian labour as being poor specimen, both in physique and morale, and of being abject, cowardly and generally lacking in vitality…The Tamils, one and all, had a half-starved look about them, and seemed to be thoroughly dissatisfied with their lot in life.

Untouchables formed the main labouring groups of South India. The relegation of the outcastes to a sort of ghetto was carried, at least in the prewar period, in South India to great lengths, the intolerable of the Brahmins being particularly conspicuous. Some Brahmins considered themselves defiled if some such outcastes as the Pariahs and Pallas came within a distance of twenty-four, thirty six or, as in some cases, even more feed.

The relegation of these casted to the level of animals in a caste-ridden society naturally tended to deprive them of initiative and self-respect, and made them a cringingly servile group. These people had neither the skill nor the enterprise to rise above the level of manual labour. Primitive and ill organized, they never appear to have known the art of collective bargaining. They were therefore also especially desirable as a ‘black-leg’ counterpoise to the more progressive labouring elements such as the Chinese who were liable to resort to the strike weapon quite readily. Willing to accept low fixed wages, they enabled employers to keep wages depressed. All in all then, these features of the South Indian Adi-dravidas made them almost the ideal labouring material for the furtherance of capitalist endeavours in Malaya.

1910 – 1930’s

They worked very hard and were paid miserable wages. They were forced to live in cramped and filthy labour lines. The social set-up in the plantation was rigidly hierarchical. The workers at the bottom of this set-up were treated with scant respect. Ravindra Jain reports that a Tamil coolie must not put on shoes, or must groom his hair only in the traditional style. Workers who dared to cross over the rigid lines of stratification faced the prospect of corporal punishment, which could be quite brutal. Even today, some estate workers can testify that they have personally witnessed the flogging of a worker for some slight infringement of discipline.

Image from ehm.my

These Indian migrants performed all rubber growing tasks, from planting seedling to tapping trees early each morning and hauling buckets of latex to collection stations in the afternoon. The plantations were located in remote inland areas of the colony, where malaria claimed the lives of many new arrivals. The work was backbreaking and the wages so low that the Indian government halted the flow of new migrant labour in 1938.

Consultative Labour Commission formed by the planters had decided the wages paid to the Indians will remain at 40 cents per day. It was raised to 75 cents per day after the 40’s despite an increase in the productivity of this docile workers as much as 55% while the profits of the plantation companies jumped to 10% - 27%. The very low wage situation in Jackson’s word “it is more likely the new coolly has nothing at all left from his pay at the end of the month and is probably in debt, with no surplus to buy anything with.

Every attempt at even modern improvement in wages and living conditions for estate employee has been contested and most cases successfully resisted by management.

Pre War Period

The Trade Union Ordinance of 1940 was formulated during a period of turmoil - World War Two had just broken out and there was a resurgence of unrest among workers, especially Indians in Selangor. Besides the recognition of the urgent need for a dispute settlement mechanism, the colonial government was more concerned about extra-labour influences which were felt to be responsible for the waves of militant strikes since the late 1930's. It is known that the emergence of General Labour Unions (GLU's) under the hegemony of the Pan Malayan General Labour Union (PMGLU) started a series of militant strikes that secured some successes in terms of increased wages and betterment of labour conditions.

The PMGLU, in fact became a popular force that secured widespread labour support from the rubber and tin mining industries. The commonly known docile worker transformed himself into a militant proved for the first time in labour history made a Chinese-Indian alliance. Indians workers were recruited into the GLUs. They were offered positions in the trade union committees giving the semblance that the GLUs were the guardians of Indian labour interests.

Among these forgotten labour leaders even by own historians and our politicians are S.A. Ganapathy, the President of the PMGLU who was hanged by the British, P. Veerasenam, President of the Singapore GLU, shot dead and R.G.Balan who was excommunicated.

Post War Period

Conditions in estates changed for the better after the Second World War. The rise of independent trade unions, the real prospect of a communist take-over and managers fear of assassination-not managerial generosity helped improve estate conditions.

By the time the stream of immigrants completely stopped, Indians made up nearly 10% of Malaya’s population. Rubber-tapping continued as the most important occupation of Indians until the 1960’s, when synthetic rubber gained prominence and many plantations switched to growing oil palm, which earned a planter two or three times as much as rubber.

In the past 25 to 35 years, three major Indian institution have been established in the Indian community, namely the Malaysian Indian Congress (MIC), the National Union of Plantation Workers (NUPW) and the National Land Finance Cooperative Society (NLFCS). These three organisations have
managed to reach the grass roots level in most estates. However, these institutions have paternalistic relations with the workers, and have not mobilised estate workers in any real sense of the word. In the absence of a spirit of service and sacrifice as well as genuine community involvement, and due to over whelming influence of materialistic values in Malaysian society, a significant number of office holders in these three big institutions work mainly, if not solely to benefit themselves – a sad state of affairs, to say the least.

Mr. Stenson describes the existence of two trout’s within the Indian community in the immediate post war years. The more progressive anti-imperialist elements were thwarted, jailed or deported by the British, leaving more conservative and chauvinistic leaders relatively much unchallenged.

Post Independence Era

After the bloody race riots erupted on May 13, 1969, the violence prompted sweeping affirmative action policies that continue to exert strong influence in Malaysian society today. Under these policies, the Malay share of national wealth jumped from 3% in 1970 to 18% two decades later. The share in Chinese hands increased from 25% to 38%, while the Indian share remained at about 1%. The Indians left the rubber plantations (mainly the younger generation) to move to the towns, but felt excluded from the new prosperity “Social problems developed in the Indian community,” political scientist P. Ramasamy notes. A new socio problem emerged, known as the urban squatter settlements.

1990’s

Indians who left the plantations are now working in various low paying jobs in urban areas such as Kuala Lumpur, Johor Baharu and Penang. They congregated in squatter’s settlements. In at least one case I know of, the urban area has come to the plantations – the Kuala Lumpur megalopolis has sprawled out into Selangor state to engulf former plantation land, which has been converted into luxury housing but the squatter zone continue to exist, cheek by jowl with the fancy housing.

These new Indians work at part-time jobs, in factories at the lowest level, as messengers and sweepers, and have the highest rate of single parent families, alcoholism, crime, prostitution and all other social evils of the Indians are and will always be the “niggers” of Malaysia.

Back in the plantation, the older generation has not all settled yet. Before the recession in the mid 1997, large swathes of rubber and oil palm plantation land were cleared for property development. Plantation workers lost their jobs and housing in exchange for a pittance in compensation. In Kedah alone, more than 10 rubber estates have been either sold for property development says an estate workers support committee activist. “And the government doesn’t have a policy on fair compensation or alternative housing for retrenched plantation workers,” he adds.

These are tough times for many of Malaysia’s rubber plantation workers, whose sweat and toil once transformed the country into the world’s largest production of the commodity.

The New Millennium

Many of the reader by now wonder, does the history of Malaysian Indian constitutes of only the plantation workers? What about their (readers) fathers who are doctors, lawyers, ministers and their uncles who are successful businessman, law makers and other so called cream of the Indian society. Don’t they share in shaping the history of the Indian society?

Perhaps to name one, Mr.Ananda Krishnan who boosted his net asset worth from USD 650 million in 1996 to USD 4,100 million in 1997. His wholly owned Usaha Tegas Sdn Bhd, with investments in a range from sweepstakes to power generation, is gradually going public, hence the big jump in his net worth estimate since the previous years. Mr. Krishnan owns privately property company KLCC Holdings which has built the worlds tallest building Petronas Twin Towers. He is 59, lives in Kuala Lumpur, married, and has three more Krishnan’s to credit. Like most Indians he is a self made man.

Along with Mr. Krishnan and the rest of the Indians owns only 1% of ownership of share capital in Malaysia. Does this make you feel proud of our achievements? Does 7.3% of the Indians who are professionals, 5.1% who are administrators and managers is considered a success story.

Is this an achievement which we are proud of after 100 years of sacrifice rendered to the growth of our nation? Well! I don’t think so.


Written by Vasu Yaranian
Note: This article was written by a friend for my previous website www.kavina.com (a website focused on Malaysian Indians, now defunct)