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

Review Essay I: Carl Vadivella Belle

With the publication of Tamils and the Haunting of Justice, Andrew Willford has emerged as one of the foremost and most innovative scholars working in the field of Indian and, more specifically, Tamil Malaysian studies. Written with the collaboration of Dr S. Nagarajan, this work has as its primary objective the examination of Tamil perceptions of their plight as an aggrieved minority in contemporary Malaysia and, in particular, of their response to the pressures exerted by an increasingly aggressive Malay-Islamist nationalism. In detailing these impressions, Willford seeks to explore the production of race and ethnicity within the context of a “political, material and legal discursive field” (p. 6); to determine notions of justice as articulated by an aggrieved community and specify how such notions both tincture and mould definitions of race and ethnicity in post-colonial states; and, more generally, to probe the processes of psychological rationalization and consequent victimization that are the obverse of dominant ethnic nationalism. Willford’s fieldwork — conducted between 2003 and 2009 — is wide-ranging, thorough and meticulously documented, and its ethnographic depth greatly enriches his analysis.

Willford’s introductory historical summary recapitulates the familiar and well-trodden ground of Malaysia’s divisive colonial legacy; the creation of racial/ethnic power structures; the identification of Malays, including recently arrived immigrants from Indonesia, as the Peninsula’s primary and definitive “race”; and the 1957 constitutional settlement — hammered out among the United Malays National Organisation (UMNO), the Malayan Chinese Association (MCA) and the British — which, in entrenching Malay hegemony, also permanently inscribed a measured separateness between Malays and the Other. The catastrophic racial riots which erupted on 13 May 1969 resulted in a further consolidation of Malay political power and placed the issue of Malay rights and privileges beyond debate. More pointedly, the 1969 riots were subsequently used as a salutary threat of future violence should Malay dominance (as invested in UMNO) or the imagined interethnic compact of the 1957 independence settlement be challenged.

Throughout the long period of his prime ministership (1981–2003), Dr Mahathir Mohamad sought to remodel Malay identity to accord with the concept of a Melayu Baru or a “New Malay”. The 1957 constitutional settlement had defined “Malay-ness” in terms of language, adherence to Islam and custom (adat). However, as Willford argues, adat was largely constructed from elements drawn from the Malay Archipelago’s long pre-Islamic exposure to Indic/Hindu influences (p. 188). A determination to extirpate all traces of an Indic/Hindu past drove Mahathir’s nationalist agenda, and it brought the official proscription of a large body of customary practices which had long shaped the broader culture of the Malay Peninsula. The new, aggressive and increasingly intolerant bureaucratized Islam has proven largely performative and obsessed with the outer forms of a “purified” Islamic culture. Doubts about the authenticity of this culture and criticisms of its superficiality are silenced through adamantine and strident reiterations of an official narrative which disavows other presences within the Malay Self. This thesis is central to Willford’s previous book, Cage of Freedom: Tamil Identity and the Ethnic Fetish in Malaysia (2006), and I shall touch upon the implications for ethnic Tamils later in this essay.

The modern history of ethnic Indians in Malaya/Malaysia has largely been one of marginalization and oppression. Brought to colonial Malaya under various labour schemes to work in the great plantations and public utilities, Indians were officially viewed as “docile” labour and thus as a counterweight to the ambitious and potentially troublesome Chinese. By the time that Indian labour migration ceased in 1938, the Indian population of Malaya consisted of a multiplicity of ethnic and sub...