Tamils and Greater India: Some issues of connected histories

Associational politics and journalism in the Indian Ocean

By the twentieth century, ports around the Indian Ocean assumed multiple roles as simultaneous bastions of European capital and enterprise and of indigenous, local modernizing experiments. The port cities were strikingly cosmopolitan, thanks to subtle and complex interactions between Europeans and the indigenous population with all its rich diversity. The interactions were mediated through multiple channels – education, business, service, trade and communications – with the result that local elites were able to put in place modern technologies of communication that included, among other things, associations and the printing press to articulate nationalism, language, group interests and shared historical experiences. Port cities, as McPherson (2002) argues, were home to Indian professionals and businessmen and the printing presses that some of them ran as enterprises. All these contributed to the development of a vibrant press culture that was replicated in centres such as Rangoon, Singapore, Durban, Dar-es-Salam, Zanzibar and Jakarta where locally run publications both in English and in local languages provided an outlet to the debates on policies and practices related primarily to immigration.

The movement of Indians across the Indian Ocean from the second half of the nineteenth century was, in terms of scale and composition, unprecedented. Circuits of communication and circulation had existed even earlier, but many of these networks had lapsed briefly in the later decades of the eighteenth century. These came alive in the nineteenth century as they responded to a very different set of pressures coming from an increasingly colonized world economy. The modalities of immigration formed the staple of colonial documentation. As early as the 1870s, we have references in the government department to the nature and transformation of Indian migration. For instance, following a controversy about emigration of Tamil labour to the Straits Settlements in the 1870s, it was pointed out by the Colonial Secretary to the Straits Settlements in his letter to the Secretary of the Government of Fort St. George, Madras, dated 1 July 1870, that prior to the nineteenth century, there was a regular trade from Penang to Nagore and the ports adjacent and that several ships belonging to both Hindus and Muslims participated in this and that the number of emigrants transported thus averaged 4000 per annum (Government of India, 1871). This increased exponentially as British plantation firms in Malaya, Natal, Fiji and Mauritius recruited Indian labour on a massive scale. Recruiting agents were located in port cities and whose operations were reported in the press. References to their oppression and harsh working conditions became grist for the journalistic mill. The government was alerted to the problem of illegal migration by reports in the Friend of India that talked of organized kidnapping and abduction. Indian editors and publicists on their part carried some of these notices; we have, for instance, reference in the Vishal Bharat (1928), edited by Banarsidas Chaturvedi, to one Subbaya Naidu endeavouring hard ‘to eliminate oppression of workers in rubber plantations,’ and to his role in forming sabhas and associations in Malaya. We also have another confessional from Pillai (1930) that he recorded as ‘My Reminiscences of Overseas Indians’. Here he mentioned how when he was 16-year-old he had seen people being trans-shipped from India to other countries. He had seen goon-like agents – stout and tough men responsible for shipping men and women to Natal and Mauritius. He had been tempted with a monthly sum of Rs 50 to take part in this traffic, but his mother’s advice saved him from the snare (Pillai, 1930). However, the experience had been transformative as he had from that moment onwards developed a keen interest in the matter of overseas Indians and which prompted him to raise it in public whenever there was an appropriate opportunity.

The levels of associational and journalistic activity registered a definite increase in the first quarter of the twentieth century, when the problems in the system of recruiting and managing labour emigration (and of the latter’s condition in the estates they toiled in) became pressing and coincided with the Government of India’s decision to expand and refine the office of the Indian agent/Protector for looking after Indian immigrants and affairs overseas. Even before this, news of emigration-related controversies and of the wretched conditions of indentured labour had begun to feature as topical subjects and had stirred a coalition of missionaries, observers and publicists into action. For instance, C.F. Andrews and H. Polak were regular contributors to periodicals such as the Modern Review and subsequently The Indian Review. In fact, even before this as early as the 1870s, English-owned newspapers and gazetteers commented on the illegality of emigration, modalities of emigration and how there was an illegal traffic in women and children who were abducted for the purposes of prostitution and employment and also how this was aggravated by the workings of parallel colonial regimes. Colonial documentation accused French authorities of complicity in illicit traffic of coolies and cases of French transgression became part of a public circuit of news and which contributed to a growing reportage on labour migrations. Right through the 1920s and 1930s, there was a visible concentration of journalistic activity that debated issues of immigrant rights within Empire, identity designation and of the nation’s responsibility towards its peoples overseas.

Tamils, overseas Indians and editors: some reflections on Indian Ocean journalism

How were the Tamils positioned within the emerging reportage on the category of the overseas Indian so prominently featured in the journalistic repertoire of publicists and social commentators working along a transnational axis of print and circulation? How did the vibrant network of cities enable the cohering of a new geography, of ideas on citizenship, identity and entitlement? For Frost (2004), the colonial public sphere of trans-oceanic discursive practices is critical for understanding new geographies of Asia. While admittedly this expanded history is still largely unwritten, it seems fair to say that Asia as a cultural as well as a geographic entity was not merely an Orientalized European fantasy, impressed on and swallowed wholesale by the region’s intellectually colonized intelligentsia. Rather, it was an entity that the region’s inhabitants, utilizing modern maritime networks and methods of social communication, themselves began to explore, to imagine, to define, to amplify and to inhabit (Frost, 2004: 94). The social lives of people and objects transcended the boundaries of nation, continent or sea and through individual life stories and institutional processes produced complex trans-societal interactions. Among these imagined geographies, the idea of Vishal Bharat or Greater India was an important and recurrent one and in the constitution of which the Tamil factor did not sit easily or immediately despite the pan-Tamil aspiration of Tamil leaders and publicists overseas. The need to find new signatures of legitimacy, identity and affect saw the occasional invocation of the geography of an expanded Tamil region that saw south-east and peninsular south India historically connected and at other times saw a greater deference and sensitivity to the immediate local context. For Malayan Tamils, eventually their location in Malaya and Singapore became the most critical determinant of their political aspirations even though within that space, they strove to maintain their Tamilness expressed through language use, religious practices and through emerging narratives of labour and self-improvement adopted by leaders in Malaya and the publicists in India.

Initially, the aspirations and ideology that guided early journalistic activity derived from a common identification with Western liberal values purveyed through the colonial education system, with particular notions of tradition and heritage and a more immediate set of instrumentalist concerns about improving the lot of their less-privileged counterparts and making information available. But there were important divergences; while, on the one hand, several editors, especially those located outside India, were more invested in issues of equality and fair treatment than an invocation of tradition and classical values, on the other hand, the editors in India espoused a more revivalist and nationalist agenda. Thus, we have someone like P.S. Aiyer, the editor of Colonial Indian News (Natal), introducing a Tamil section for his readers so that many more people of Tamil extraction could familiarize themselves with overseas news. At the same time, we have a strong case put forward for the toiling immigrant, for labour whose rights had to be safeguarded even if these meant contesting the might of Empire. Each of these initiatives was part of the transnational print culture put together by enterprising elites deploying modern means of communication (see Hofmeyr et al., 2011: 1–22). Similarly we have the case of Chetty newspapers in India more preoccupied with questions of regulating ostentation and dowry, of safeguarding the purity of the Chettiar community in India and overseas. However, all of them, in some measure, were determined by the ideological frameworks of empire that fostered certain expectations of Imperial citizenship and of the emerging nation that provided a source of affective identification that was not always amenable to practical translation.

Virtually, all newspapers and journals across the Indian Ocean deployed the category of the ‘overseas Indian’ in highlighting the problems that immigration brought in its wake and the challenges it posed for the salience of citizenship within empire. Tamil migrant groups constituted a critical segment within this category. The mode of representation employed for the Tamils was complex. There was, for instance, a recurring appreciation of the historical value of earlier Tamil settlement in South East Asia and their role as important conduits of Indic culture. Thus, the reportage that was put forward by journals and their editors made common cause occasionally with professional historians in debating the contours of Hindu colonization. It was not entirely a coincidence that editors like G. Natesan of The Indian Review carried the writings of historians like Majumdar (1935: 17) who worked out in the capacity of a professional historian the idea of Greater India even as he gave space for other/multiple versions of this concept. However, there is also ambivalence about the coolie profile of the Tamil population. Even Tagore in his occasional reflections on overseas Indians gave expression to his anxiety about the ‘wretched coolie’. What is striking however is that Tamil immigrants themselves – both labour and capital – had very little investment in the idea of Greater India. Contemporary Chetty narratives either in the form of personal reminiscences or in their own newspapers were preoccupied with more immediate issues of community reform and political representation to bring greater pressure on the colonial state to enable them to negotiate the pressures of ethnic politics in South East Asia. Labour on its part, or rather on the part of publicists speaking for them, was more concerned with the larger issue of class solidarity and labour relations.

How did Tamils envisage their space in the new lands they occupied and how distant was this experience from the conventional representation of Tamils as historic agents in the world of the Indian Ocean? Obviously, there is no single or singular representation; in the early modern period of contacts and commerce, we know that Tamils, Hindus and Muslims fashioned a very distinct space for themselves that corresponded to an expanded geography constituted around quotidian experience as well as religious networks, especially of Islam. For instance, Bayly (2004) refers to the Tamil Muslim geographies with nodal centres stretching from Nagore to Penang and also to the way these groups imagined their space of circulation, interconnections and practice. This premodern imagination reflected a universal dimension and was as Ho’s (2006) work has demonstrated part of a Hadrami diaspora with its articulations on public space and order. With Tamil Hindu capital and labour migrations in the nineteenth and twentieth century, a different model of self-definition and of geography seems to have worked and which only partly fed into the larger mainstream of Greater India notion put forward by both professional cultural historians and intellectuals like Kalidas Nag and R.C. Majumdar and publicists like G. Natesan or Taraknath Das and Banarsidas Chaturvedi.

Newspapers and periodicals that took up the cause of Indians overseas from whatever location identified Tamils as the most important group in South East Asia – Burma, Malaya and Indo-China. Here, as in relation to other groups in Africa or elsewhere in the Indian Ocean, there was a running appreciation of mercantile enterprise that was held out as a legitimate basis to demand greater protection for the rights of overseas Indians, who constituted an ‘India’ outside its immediate territorial limits. There was also the vital question of looking after labour and its concerns such as issues of wage control, emigration procedures and the thorny issue of repatriation. It was in this sense that publicists like Banarsidas Chaturvedi and Taraknath Das spoke of Greater India – an idea that was expected to urge Indians at home to look more carefully at their compatriots elsewhere and take greater interest in their situation. As Taraknath Das wrote in the pages of the Hindi, ‘It (the Hindi) is also doing very valuable service to the people of India at home to make them see the problem of Greater India’ (in this article, Das suggested that the Indian National Congress establish a separate overseas section and fight for the rights of overseas Indians: Das, 1925). Not surprisingly, the journals carried extensive details on immigrant groups and on the immediate pressures they faced. The Tamils were most frequently mentioned in the context of the Straits Settlements. Both the newspapers in Singapore and Malaya like the Straits Times and the Singapore Free Press and Native Advertiser carried pieces on the Tamils in terms of labour migration-related issues as well as cultural practices of Indian communities including the Chettiars. Indian-owned and Indian-managed journals debated these issues and threw up serious and committed activists like Lanka Sundaram or Nilkan Perumal who also happened to make a strong case for the enterprise and commercial vitality of Tamil commercial communities like the Chetties. The result was a reinforcement of the success story of Indian capital and of the difficulties faced by Indian labour. Echoing the strains of Gujarati pride that resonated in the journals relating to East Africa where the success of Gujarati mercantile enterprise was seen as the foundational basis for Imperial success, journal editors gave space for extended observations on the vitality of Indian immigrants and how their energy and enterprise had to be commended. Admittedly, there was in this complex dynamics of caste and community self-representation as well as of nationalist rhetoric that invoked ideas of tradition and civilization of the Indic variety and which did not always converge. In contrast to the depressed immigrant coolie, was the Chetty whose presence The Indian Review observed was a

… theoretical undesirability but a practical blessing. Remove the Chetty from his business in the village and the whole financial structure comes down like a house of cards. An agent of a popular bank in Rangoon told the writer that all the banks in the city except probably the Imperial Bank will have to close their doors without the Chetty. This is just because of the simple fact that the agriculturists in the interior villages had been finding the Chetty banker the most convenient agent to finance him in time of need. It is the village Chetty and not the European banker who he has confidence in. (The Indian Review, 1925: 490–491)

The indispensability of the Chetties and indeed even of labour was a recurrent feature of reportage, thereby reinforcing the argument that Indian presence whether of the present or of the past was always grounded in a mode of service and buttressed by an abiding faith in a value system that found resonant echoes. This admittedly was the line adopted by Indian associations in Malaya in the 1930s and which journals like The Indian Review or the Hindi or Vishal Bharat reflected quite regularly and enthusiastically. Intellectuals responded to this quite enthusiastically – we have the poet Tagore’s article published in the 1924 edition of The Indian Review where he acknowledged his appreciation of the energy demonstrated by the Chetty and Chinaman in Malaya in contrast to the degraded coolies who remained perpetually coolies (Tagore, 1924: 576). Evidently, this strain of public opinion provided an important context for the development of the Greater India idea as articulated by professional historians and intellectuals who among other things were in conversation with French archaeologists and scholars and experimented with the ideas of a creative and dynamic India that colonized in the best sense of the term but not by the adoption of coercive state power and violence. India here was the giver, the noble civilizer whose ideas were assimilated and adopted by other peoples across Asia. It was thus not merely fortuitous that The Indian Review should also carry the serialized versions of R.C. Majumdar’s writings on Greater India even as it relentlessly advocated safeguards for Indian labour and its future. Historians and professional scholars Nilakanta Sastri (1978) and S. Krishnaswami Aiyangar (1923) alike endorsed this line of thinking and extolled the maritime energies of ancient Tamils. Interestingly, the Chetties themselves in the journals and newspapers they sponsored held a different conception of their location as well as of their geography.

Where did the coolies, immigrant labouring groups figure in the scheme? Evidently their aspirations and activities needed to be protected and managed but could not be written into the history of India’s glory and exploits. Theirs was a story of toil and degradation, but even here, it was possible to discern in their history a potential to interrogate the burden of caste and also to re-engage with issues of entitlement and citizenship. Their self-definition thus required not so much a history of antiquity and tradition as it did of language and cultural practices that could thereafter become the basis for a new set of demands in the country of adoption and residence. The geography and history of their choice was neither simply determined by India nor even by the demands of Tamil separatism but by a more complex notion of cultural ecology and material choice.

Narratives of capital and labour: home and the other

Chetty migrations into the Straits and Burma in the nineteenth century were largely fuelled by the needs of the colonial economy. What had enabled them to expand so successfully was the system of agency whereby trusted caste members were sent out as triennial agents to conduct loan operations in overseas British colonies. They assiduously maintained their connections with their ancestral natal base in Chettinad (Sivaganga district in Tamil Nadu) and participated in the changing public sphere in South India and in the settlements outside. Newspapers and associations constituted important sites of articulation and self-definition. A close reading of Chetty newspapers – the Vysian, Vysyamitran and Oolian as well as newspapers in Singapore and Malaya is revealing. While in the initial stages, the newspapers enabled the community to define themselves in relation to the home (Chettinad), subsequently they took up a stand on issues that configured a new politics of Tamil revivalism in Malaya. For the most part, Chetty newspapers debated on issues of self-definition and community reform relating especially to dowry and child marriage. The call given to the community settled and scattered all over Asia was to reform its habits. The Dhana Vaishya Oozhian came out openly in its 1920 issue stating that the tendency for conspicuous consumption was to be abhorred and also stressed the need to agitate more effectively at a time when the crisis in South East Asia threatened their business ventures. The need of the hour was greater representation:

As British subjects, what can be worse than to be excluded? Is it enough to just open new shops without addressing any of these issues? Should we be in slumber even as the Rangoon Association has shown the way? All of us as Dhanavaishyas should form associations everywhere in Kuala Lumpur, Penang, Singapore and carry on with our activities to build decisive public opinion. (Dhana Vaishya Oozhian, 1920)

We do not detect in these expressions an emphasis on the idea of an extended India, rather an extended field for commercial operations and claims to greater imperial protection. Even as custodians of culture, the community demonstrated its identification with Tamil language and culture that was not necessarily coeval with the Indic imagination. Their investment in language politics did not find a correspondence with either the language politics of labouring groups in the Straits or in the radical politics associated with Tamil separatism and anti-Brahmanism. In fact, what seems to have distinguished Chetty self-representation was the narrowness of its concerns. The narratives, therefore, spoke either on the need for reform or on success stories of individuals like Alagappa Chettiar who was a successful business man, a man of letters and a great patron all rolled in one. The self-definition of the community was organized around biographies of men such as Annamalai Chettiar whose services, wealth and involvement with Tamil culture were frequently invoked by Chetty associations in Kuala Lumpur and Singapore and by the Malayan Indian Association that had a strong Chettiar presence. The emphasis was on Tamil and the identities that it encompassed from a particular form of religious practice to language use and related cultural productions that circulated within a larger geography. However, some of the leaders and senior publicists in the community were urged to speak on behalf of labour, and here, the discourse assumed explicit nationalist overtones. In 1935, we have Mukundan (agent to the Government of India) addressing the merchants in Malaya to take a greater interest in labour:

Indians began to immigrate to this country long ago, but the bulk of the Indian population in this country is of the labouring class. By this I should not be considered to be saying anything disparaging in manual labour and there is nothing degrading doing the work of another who is unable to do it. But the labourers cannot assert their rights without the help of others. You merchants and our friends the Nattukottai Chettiars are the moneyed classes of the Indian community and it is you who should support your less fortunate brethren. You must also realize that you in this country have a duty to your motherland. By the want of unity among them, the Indians lost ground in this country considerably, and if the present state of things continues, in no time they will be nowhere. What is wanted is united action and a corporate representative body of Indians which can make its voice heard for united we stand and divided we fall. (Mukundan, 1935: 495)

Similar sentiments were expressed by Srinivasa Sastri who urged Indians in Malaya to be proud of the fact that they were inheritors of a great civilization and which could be regenerated by their ties with India. However, these publicists were equally insistent that the immigrants’ rights be protected and that they did not fall victim to the government’s repatriation schemes and that they strove to integrate themselves fully with the host country.

Thus, from the very start, labour was brought into the nationalizing discourse of Greater India and did not in any way reflect the aspirations of the plantation coolie. For labouring groups in the plantation estates and elsewhere, what mattered was protection of basic rights that enabled them to maintain themselves and their families back home and to maintain ties of language and ritual that connected them with an imaginary that was not easily encapsulated. However, the diffusion of entertainment practices, notably Tamil drama, would seem to have reinforced a sense of a connected geography whose sacral and linguistic features were mapped on to the local landscape. As Amrith (2010) suggests, their identification with the new landscape dotted with new temples meant the beginning to an alternative articulation of affect and sensibility. Thus, sanction for material progress and for religious observances became guiding principles for the immigrant labouring groups in their project of self-fashioning. Here, they were half emulating what Swaminathan (1914), Secretary of the Indian Colonial Society, observed:

Be Indians in your outlook upon life, be Indians in your religious tendencies, in your spiritual aims. But in material circumstances, in outward ways, in adaptiveness to the new conditions, there is no need at all, why you should refuse to be molded by your environment.

Labour and the material imperative

The visibility of Tamil immigrants in the Straits was a direct consequence of indentured labour migrations of the later decades in the nineteenth century. The status of the migrants, the conditions of their employment and regulations affecting their mobility and settlement were some of the issues that were taken up by the journals and periodicals even as deputations led by Indians published frequent reports on the working condition of the emigrants within empire. Among the issues most frequently debated, the most persistent one referred to the idea of imperial citizenship rights, repatriation of immigrants, wage regulations and subsequently of language and education benefits. Material prosperity was seen as a vital precondition to integration in the society they had adopted even as they pressed for language protection and ritual practices. Material success alone could lift the immigrant from his lowly status and on the effective integration into local society that had to be achieved if their rights were to be protected. The material imperative subsequently translated into a strong articulation of a distinct Malayan Tamil/Indian identity that did not echo the political ideology and aspirations of either Indian nationalism or Tamil Dravidianism.

An image often featured in newspapers was that of the proud agent showing off his household effects to new arrivals. This clearly enabled the perceptions of better lifestyles that immigration promised and fashioned new self-perceptions of immigrant Indian labour in the colonies. This sense of a better life was invoked time and again to mark off the community from their brethren in India as well as to highlight the pressures that migrants faced when forcibly repatriated. Bhavani Dayal wrote regularly about the miserable conditions in which the repatriated members had to survive and also commented on their attachment to the colonies in which they had worked:

I did not meet a single returned happy emigrant who is happy with his new environment’, he wrote ‘and who would not like to return to the colony if he could only get a chance … (The Indian Review, 1930: 132)

Others spoke of difficult and different climatic conditions and the wage differentials that made it impossible for workers to return. English language newspapers by and large emphasized the necessity for greater representation and reported on proceedings of All Malaya Indian Conferences where resolutions about minimum wages and working conditions were debated and passed. They also spoke out strongly against repatriation; Lanka Sundaram, Dayal and Chaturvedi made it evident that repatriation was not the answer to the problem and that the demand for imperial citizenship had to be addressed.

To recuperate the actual experiences or aspirations of Tamil labouring groups in their adopted milieu and of their interaction with leaders who took up their cause is not easy. There is not much doubt that the problems faced were considerable and varied widely depending on location. We also do get rare glimpses from complaints that were made to the official authorities and that circulated and reproduced in newspapers and gazettes. From the minute they embarked for the long journey, they were subject to corporal search and scrutiny. To make matters worse, their conditions of employment were not always easy and even worse after the Great Depression, the situation forced them to move and migrate illegally within the larger region exposing them to serious pressures. We have, for instance, a communication from Rao Saheb K. Nair (Agent of the Government of India in British Malaya) to the Secretary of State for Government of India forwarding a complaint of Indian labourers in Siam (Government of India, 1933). The complaint was from a south Indian named Palani who worked in southern Siam, a place the agent could not visit because it was not part of his jurisdiction. Nair also sent a cutting from the corresponding column of the Pinang Gazette (23 January 1933) that highlighted the plight of Indian labourers who migrated to Siam from the bordering Malay states of Kedah and Kelantan owing to the rubber slump and consequent unemployment in those states. Palani referred to his distress and to the duplicity of a Chinese towkay whose actions had brought ruin to Palani as his movement and operations were intercepted by authorities in Siam. The Pinang Gazette publicized the plight of Indian coolies whose working conditions were appalling and the problems they faced when they were seduced to illegally move across borders (see Government of India, 1933, mentioned above; and an extract from Pinang Gazette, 23 January 1933). Tamil newspapers in Malaya and Singapore also took up their cause and in doing so helped foster a clearer articulation of immigrant interests in the colony. The deployment of language was an important strategy in this even as cultural practices and ritual observances helped cohere and consolidate the immigrant’s identity through his preferred location in the colony and his affective association with language use and cultural practice. We have, for example, a very insightful comment on Tamil labour and their practices by J.M. Barron who was acting Controller of Labour in Malaya in the 1930s. His report was published in part by the Straits Times where he observed the generally sunny and gregarious disposition of Tamil labour and how his sociality enabled him to form important linkages and associations across the estate lines. Among his leisure activities were crab fishing and hare hunting and lightning speed oratory but even more important was a fascination for Tamil drama that was extremely popular. In Barron’s (1936) words, the labourers gaze

in awe at the incongruously attired cast which may include at the one time, a warrior of the Stone Age, the Saracen, a sepoy and a gorgeous rajah – all equipped magnificent moustaches without which a man cannot be a warrior. (p. 10)

The subject of these plays were mythological or historical and had plenty of songs ‘often highly libellous’ and the telling of stories helped pass time and also helped in an informal education of sorts not to speak of forging a shared auditory identification. In fact, it was through the circulation of entertainment practices and visits by drama companies that that the connections with the natal Tamil zone became stronger even as later efforts were focused on developing more local talent and on toning down such ritual practices that smacked of a backward-looking tradition.

The cause for labour was taken up by several associations that sprang up – mostly dominated by urban middle-class leaders and by publicist editors and contributors to journals. Apart from the loose affiliation, the emerging association enjoyed with Indian National opinion and or Dravidian Tamil politics, what was significantly different was the stress laid on Malayan Tamil identity rather than that of an expanded Tamil consciousness that was laying claim to a new and expanded geography. This not only meant that not only did the idea of a Greater India not enjoy particular purchase but also that being Tamil and Malayan gestured to a different register of subjective experience. This was evident even when rhetorically groups and individuals spoke on the need to keep cultural ties with India alive and vibrant and indeed in the case of cultural practices to ensure a degree of authenticity. A strong countervailing tendency was to develop a homespun set of cultural practices and styles that did not remain imitative. Even when it came to the advocacy of Tamil ethnicity, there was a very clear acknowledgement of the need to demarcate the Malayan experience from caste experiences in Tamil Nadu. The rejection of Naiker’s atheism and diatribes against caste differences were made explicit and seen as meaningless in a context where the situation was quite different (see Subramanian, 2010).

It was over the repatriation issue that the irrelevance of geography became especially visible. Immigrants resisted repatriation; they offered a dozen excuses for their reluctance from climate to remittances to wage differentials, and publicists advocating their cause were entirely sympathetic to their position. The latter grounded their arguments within the narrative of caste and its tyranny. In the 1931 issue of The Indian Review, B.D. Chaturvedi wrote how immoral it was for government to

… encourage unsuspecting and ignorant Indians from the colonies to return to India to lead a miserable life in the hope that others who are left behind will be uplifted is at once selfish and immoral – selfish on the part of the leaders of the remaining colonial Indians and immoral on our part when we have not got the moral courage to take those returned emigrants back into our society and our own caste. (Chaturvedi, 1931: 452)

Bhavani Dayal was even more explicit in his own publication. The situation in Malaya was no different – the indigent wage workers were viewed with contempt in Malaya and ignored in India, becoming in the process ‘the tragic orphans of whom India has well nigh forgotten and Malaya looks down upon in contempt – a worthless dregs in a prosperous society’ (The Indian Review, 1938). The way out of this double bind was to cultivate the habits of a docile subject and opt for material improvement, which alone could earn the immigrant the new status in a cosmopolitan public space outside the territorial limits of the nation. Newspapers like the Indian Daily Mail and the Indian Pioneer in Kuala Lumpur reflected this new awareness of Indian sensibility in the public arena and assumed a predictably moderate position in relation to religious reform eschewing both the radical atheism of the Tamil non-Brahmin movement in southern India as well as the extreme cultural purity implicit in Indian cultural nationalism. The action for social reform and public display was framed in the rhetoric of moderate and civilized behaviour even as a strong sense of wanting to create a distinct Malayan Tamil identity through language was forged. The Malayan Indian associations, irrespective of their hues – be it pro Indian National Congress or the Tamil and Dravidian association – was open to reform as they felt this was essential for their self-image in the country. This was especially articulated in the context of temple reform where the responsibility for management lay with labouring castes, the resistance to reform was not marked – in fact one may see here quite clearly the making of a new cosmopolitan identity that was contingent on improved economic status and a more considered appreciation of public space where religious practices had to be reworked (see issues of Indian Daily Mail, 1950). Whether this altered the salience of caste as an experiential category is of course open to debate and outside the scope of this article.

Finally, by way of a concluding observation, how and whether the articulation of a Malayan Tamil identity and its positioning within the larger Malaysian and Singapore state produced a new kind of history writing remains a question waiting to be addressed. The fact that the Tamil experience found little resonance in the histories that were produced in the first quarter of the twentieth century in India is in stark contrast to the bold and unequivocal assertion made by public figures and activists like N.C. Ganguly and Lanka Sundaram about the emancipatory potential of immigration. In fact, historians like Sastri (1953) continued to frame their understanding of Ancient India within the nationalist frame and to push forward albeit cautiously the history of Indo-Malay connections in antiquity. Predictably, his preference for Sanskrit as a source language generated some degree of disquiet in Malaya, and he was often asked to explain his views by a somewhat irate readership (Sastri, 1953: 9). In fact, writing to the Straits Times, he assured the readers that his intention was not to minimize the importance of Tamil as a language study for Indians. Publicists and activists on the other hand saw in transnational politics of labour and migration an opportunity to critique its values. Take, for instance, the case of N.C. Ganguly who in his survey of Indians in the Empire, observed that

they (countrymen) must realize that as long as they maintain an iniquitous social system in their own country which tolerates oppression and injustice they cannot with complete justice protest against European racism. If our countrymen are segregated in the British colonies and Dominions, we should regard the treatment as a just nemesis which has overtaken us for the crime of untouchability.

As he observed,

we are wholly responsible for the consequences of ignoring the need of cultural contact with the countries where Indians emigrate and settle. Our traders have not been purveyors of culture and our labourers are generally drawn from the lower strata of life. It is a serious omission on the part of the advanced section of the Indian communities in the Empire overseas that they have hitherto made no serious efforts to establish cultural contacts with the indigenous population and other communities. (Gangulee, 1947: 226)

The need of the hour was thus investment in a set of cosmopolitan ideas that ranged from a jettisoning of caste to an appreciation of civic responsibilities and virtues. Reformist legislation tended to be informed partly by the sensibilities and preoccupation of the higher castes and partly by the compulsions of aligning with the emerging national regimes. Time and again, Indian leaders both in India and in Malaya encouraged this tendency; as Srinivasa Sastri, agent of the Government of India, suggested in 1937,

It is for them to show in every way the representatives and inheritors of a great ancient civilization. While their civilization and religion and culture should remain affiliated to the motherland they should as quickly as possible identify themselves with the fortunes of this land (Malaya). (The Indian Review, 1937: 120)

The advice was in a sense not so incongruous as the immigrant was generally seen as a victim who had lost his language, caste and culture – a lack that Gandhi gave expression to during the debates on repatriation – and which by logic rendered it impossible to enjoy the empathy with the so-called Indian tradition. Therefore, where did Greater India figure in this reality? For the Chetty traders, the sacral geography was still tied up to their natal nucleus in Chettinad, but for labour, there was a clear imperative to become global, one aspect of which was to adopt reform and assume an interest in civic affairs that was seen as a crucial resource in the struggle for equal citizenship rights. Here lay the transformative potential of travel, diasporic experience and material advancement that became the markers of a new identity that was only partially in tune with the larger versions of identity, religion and language in the mainland. Not surprising therefore that in Malaya, the Tamil movement in its language and devotional aspects adopted a more pragmatic approach. The Malayan Tamil Association by the 1940s was beginning to speak in favour of more local expressions of culture encouraging local artistic and linguistic initiatives that could gesture to a larger pan-Tamil consciousness but equally could reflect a more localized reality. Evidently, this was a different cosmopolitan ideal than the older modes of sociality that premodern conceptions had provided. While its vulnerability in the face of statist interventions and of global capital is evident, it would be worthwhile to explore its ongoing potential.