Different Voices: The Singaporean/Malaysian Novel

8. THE ROAD TO CHANDIBOLE (1994)

181 THE ROAD TO CHANDIBOLE (1994) In The Road to Chandibole (1994), Marie Gerrina Louis’s first novel, the writer uses the apparent romantic portrayal of a strong Tamil woman in love with a strong Chinese man to make a serious comment on the marginalized Tamil women living in the rubber estates. What the novel suggests then are two levels of reading: one type of reader might read it as an autobiographical account of a romance, while the second would construct quite a different meaning altogether. Louis, by setting the narrative in the turbulent years between 1945 and 1960 in the Malay peninsula, portrays an historical period when the lives of Tamil women living in the rubber estates were brutalized by Hindu customs, their male counterparts, and other women. Hence it is “a serious novel which deals with various post-colonial and Marxist-feminist concerns” (Manaf and Quayum 2001, p. 411). Using an autobiographical narrative mode, the writer has created a female protagonist, Saras, who lives in the CHAPTER VIII 08 SMNovel.indd 181 10/5/09 2:17:06 PM 182 Different Voices periphery of the Chandibole Estate with six other families: two Tamil, one Chinese, one Malay, one Eurasian, and one European, the manager of the estate. The tension and suspense in the narrative is engendered by the portrayal of a strong woman amidst the turbulence of the Emergency, fighting her private battles, and at the same time, wrestling for the rights of the marginalized women in her environment. The writer presents the plight of the marginalized women through the observations of the protagonist who is the first person narrator. The reader is given an insight into the brutality that is inherent in one of the traditional Hindu customs. This brutality is captured by the lexical borrowings from Tamil. The narrator uses untranslated Tamil words to “seize the language, re-place it in a specific cultural location, and yet maintain the integrity of that Otherness” (Ashcroft et al., 1989, p. 77). This brutal custom is witnessed by Saras: Two old women got up and went to her. One held Ponni tightly down while the other pulled the flowers out of her hair — practically ripped them out. Ponni wailed all the time but the determined women raked the girl’s hair free of every single bud. Then, using the sweat on Ponni’s forehead, the woman wiped off the pottu. Next, they broke all the bangles on her arms forcibly, even drawing blood in some places … When those awful women clutched at Ponni’s thali … she screamed and went on screaming even when the women managed to yank the thali over her head. (p. 48) The brutal manner in which Ponni is socially made a widow is juxtaposed with the emotional and psychological damage inflicted by the custom. The Tamil words appear within the framework of Standard English. In the above passage the 08 SMNovel.indd 182 10/5/09 2:17:06 PM The Road to Chandibole (1994) 183 writer uses certain Tamil words which cannot be directly translated into English. Take for instance the word thali. This word cannot be translated into a single English word as it has a symbolic meaning. Since the concept is too complex to be contained in one English word, the narrator gives its meaning within parentheses: “(the symbol of marriage which Indian women wear hanging around their necks on gold chain or yellow string)” (p. 48). The other word is pottu which is explained as “(a red dot painted onto the forehead to signify the marital status of an Indian woman)” (p. 48). Both these words are sacred to the Hindu women. By using them, the narrator manages to represent the horror going through the mind of a woman deprived of the status which these symbols provide her. Earlier in the narrative the disaster of widowhood is depicted in the portrayal of Vali, Saras’s mother. After her husband’s death, Vali is reduced to earning a living by becoming a rubber tapper. By using the lexical borrowings from Tamil, the narrator foregrounds the cultural distinctiveness of this traditional brutality practised by the Hindu Tamils. The ritual of stripping the marital status has a strong impact on the fifteen year-old Saras, the narrator. Years later, in a similar ritual, she intervenes before it starts: … they were just beginning to break her glass bangles. “Stop it! The...