Reclaiming Space on a Transforming Plantocratic Chequerboard: Pierre Boulle's Sacrilege in Malaya

In their introduction to Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World (1997), Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler write, “[t]he colonies of France, England and the Netherlands—more ambivalently, of Spain and Portugal—did more than reflect the bounded universality of metropolitan culture: they constituted an imaginary and physical space in which the inclusions and exclusions built into the notions of citizenship, sovereignty and participation were worked out”(3). However, the writers also point out that the working out of this space was not totally within their control for “what Europeans encountered in the colonies was not open terrain of economic domination, but people capable of circumventing and undermining the principles and practices on which extraction or capitalist development was based”(5).

Malaya, through her status as a protectorate of the imperial governance of England, was one of these spaces upon which the rites of inclusion and exclusion were exercised. The colonialists present in the protected States clearly built upon codes of conduct that ensured that their governing space remained inaccessible to those they ruled over. Colonialist literature on Malaya provides glimpses into the enactment of such stratagem of empire. Yet they do also demonstrate the points of disruption to the colonialist stranglehold. This paper is concerned with the ways in which the rules of that very space were resisted by the colonised and chooses to look specifically at Indian plantation labourers in Malaya and the changing nature of their relationship with their colonial managers. Instead of the usual British planter, I have chosen instead a text by a French planter. Pierre Boulle’s Sacrilege in Malaya demonstrates interesting perspectives on dominance and subalternity, not only with the Indian labour force but also with France’s rival and far more dominant imperial power in Malaya, Britain.

Shridath Ramphal once referred to the Indian peasants who were transported to work on the various colonial plantations in the nineteenth century as “mute pieces on the chequerboard of worldwide colonialism”(63). The argument that follows reverses this image of the muted figurines of labour while retaining the metaphor of the chequerboard as it demonstrates that the effort to keep the labourers well within the boundaries of the squares was not without its problems. Time and again, the planters found their coolies crossing over the boundary lines, thus claiming more space than they were entitled to on the colonial board and these were neither noiseless nor reticent performances. Boulle’s novel enacts the dynamics of such manoeuvres.

The text opens with the image of a French financier and his cobbler, the former entertaining visions of an enterprise in rubber in British Malaya:

You sing, therefore you act. I am and I think. I’ve tried to stop you acting and singing. I’ve been wrong, From now on we’re going to act together. You sing, therefore you act; you can work in wood just as well as leather. We shall extract latex from the trees of the equatorial forests. I shall move you there. You will tap the rubber trees. I shall give you the necessary tools. I shall plant more trees. I shall build you a house. I shall sell the rubber. All you need do is sing and tap the trees.”

(4)

His words depict a confidence of deftly controlling every movement of his labour force, manoeuvring each and every one of them on the chequerboard that he has devised for himself and ensuring that he stays well within the boundaries of the checks he is placed within. Yet, the dynamics of the plantation world is not as easily contained as he imagines it to be. The Indian labourer demonstrates remarkable agility in intermittently disrupting the manoeuvres of the colonial hand that is intent on working out and maintaining the boundaries of exclusion and inclusion within the coveted colonial space.

The text proceeds with the arrival of Maille, newly recruited as assistant manager to one of the plantations in Malaya owned by the financier’s company, the Society for the Overseas Promotion of Horticulture, Industry and Agriculture or SOPHIA for short. His subsequent...