Tamils and the Haunting of Justice: History and Recognition in Malaysia’s Plantations by Andrew C. Willford (review)

The main author, Andrew Willford, an associate professor of anthropology at Cornell University, has previously written extensively on the subject of the treatment of Indian estate communities by the Malaysian government. This book focuses on the plight of Tamil communities in Selangor, displaced and threatened by displacement when estates, which had been established in many cases over a century ago, are closed down and the land used for housing development.

Given the extraordinary speed with which development has taken place recently, this is a timely exposé of problems which have been encountered by the Indian community in Malaysia’s most prosperous state. It is fair to assume that similar problems and pressures, albeit to a lesser extent, face most Indian estate communities along the length of the west coast of the Peninsula.

Although Malaysians of Indian ethnic origin comprise less than 10 per cent of the population of Malaysia, they have been concentrated on the west coast of the Peninsula, from the time rubber estates were introduced there in the boom years of the early twentieth century. Since the Malays were reluctant to work on the estates, British estate owners recruited labour from whole villages of impoverished Tamils in southern India to undertake this work.

It is the plight of the third and fourth generations of these migrants which is the subject of this book. Like other isolated migrant communities, they have in many cases retained the traditional customs of their original communities with extreme fidelity: so much so that those studying such communities in India have been known to visit the Malaysian Tamil villages to obtain some idea of the customs in India a century ago. Religion observances are therefore fundamental to the life of the community, focused round the temples, in many cases over 100 years old. Moreover, the structure, social fabric and cohesion of the community depend on ties of marriage and peer pressure, which can only be weakened when the community dispersed.

The first significant disposals of estate land for development took place in the 1970s and 1980s. In these cases, the author shows that because the intrinsic value of the land, even with conversion permission for housing, was relatively low, well-organized communities were reasonably successful in obtaining alternative housing in areas where the majority of the community could continue to live in fairly close proximity, bringing with them their temple gods.

More recent conversions of estate lands for housing have had significantly less satisfactory outcomes for the Tamil communities thus displaced, partly because the underlying value of the land has increased very substantially. There is thus extreme reluctance by either the estate or the developer to set aside land for low-cost housing for displaced workers. Added to this is the strong perception within the Tamil community that those responsible for such large new housing developments wish to reflect a middle-class Islamic culture: hence the building of many mosques and surau, and the extreme reluctance of developers to accommodate any un-Islamic (in this case, Hindu) places of worship.

The legal compensation payable to displaced estate workers is modest and quite inadequate, on its own, to enable the purchase of alternative low-cost accommodation. However, by a process of trial and error, estate communities threatened with displacement, assisted by NGOs and lawyers working pro bono, have learned to use the law to its full extent to delay their eviction. This tactic of exacerbated delay together with the threat of publicity adverse to the developers appears to be the only way by which the displaced Tamil communities can force developers into any sort of reasonable settlement, which takes into account the many years they and their forebears have worked on the land, thus contributing to the prosperity of the country.

Deep concern and resentment were also expressed by many Tamils in...