The unreliability of the minor: Class consciousness and its social effects

Class history as cultural history

Evening is the Whole Day’s distinctive focus on the class tensions that divide the Indian ethnic minority community is largely shaped by a now almost forgotten period in world history. The novel’s focus on intra-ethnic tensions brings class to the center, but links it also to colonial and postcolonial histories of Indian labor under colonialism that continue to haunt the experiences of postcolonial Indian Malaysians. In her 2012 essay on the figure of the “rubber estate girl” for instance, Dashini Jeyathurai sees Chellam as the unwelcome reminder of colonial legacies as well as national failure: “Chellam enters the cityscape and the domain of urban, middle-class Malaysian-Indians, where she becomes a living, breathing, speaking archive of disturbing cultural and national narratives that many wish to forget” (p. 311). Class inequality can itself become minoritized in our political imaginaries because it disrupts other more useful narratives such as the touting of achievements already attained by economic growth or national development. In fact, intra-racial tensions can be linked to trends in the development of Indian labor in colonial Malaya during the rubber boom that started at the end of the nineteenth century, through the pre-war period, and then the decline of the rubber industry after the Great Depression, from which it never recovered. ⁵

Historically, economic inequality as a social issue has been minimized in Malaysian studies because the inter-racial tensions that exist between the Malays who are the dominant racial group, followed by the Chinese and Indians, and the indigenous population or the Orang Asal, have seemed to be more urgent. ⁶ At the end of British colonialism in 1957, as the new nation-state began to rebuild itself after centuries of colonial rule and a devastating war, it was faced with the challenge of incorporating different racial groups into a new political entity. However, as the novel demonstrates, unaddressed economic inequality can fuel intra- as well as inter-racial tensions.

To see one form of social inequality—race opposed to class position, for example—as the greater of two evils, that is, to triage different kinds of oppression as if they were isolated or self-contained, is itself an unintended but far-reaching consequence of British colonial policies. Racial, geographic, and labor segregation established under British rule were what led to postcolonial class differences that fuel contemporary inter- and intra-racial tensions. The British strategy of “divide and rule” created a segmented society in Malaya that prevented each racial community from working together to challenge colonial rule. The Malays worked in rice and agriculture, the Chinese in the tin mines, and the Indians in the rubber plantations. Colonial ideas about racial dispositions, values, and how to best manage raced labor formed racial groups in their modern forms, that is, racial identities that are fixed, stable, and homogeneous. ⁷ These racial groups became identified with particular industries, professions, and geography, and consequently also by class, because each sector was varyingly profitable. Consequently, racial identity was formed in response to class position and class identity, and class tensions continue to stratify postcolonial Malaysia. Motivated by political and economic goals, and incorporated as part of the state, divisions of race and class continue to have social effects that are felt after over half a century of national independence, but class difference is often under emphasized in political discussions about racial difference.

The rise of the Southeast Asian rubber industry is a minor episode even within national history, but this period of economic activity and productivity of the plantations was a major event that integrated Malaya into the larger global economy. The rubber boom reached its height in the years leading up to the Second World War and during this time, Malaya’s rubber industry generated half the world’s supply of rubber when the automobile was beginning to be manufactured at a large scale (The New York Times, 1957). Without the tin produced by Chinese laborers and the rubber by Indian laborers in Malaya, modern manufacturing and economic development in Britain and the United States would have grinded to a halt:

It is Perak tin that gets together with Pittsburg sheet iron in Philadelphia and makes the non-corrosive sheet that becomes a can in San Francisco and brings us our California fruit in perfect state; and it is Brazilian raw rubber grown along the Strait of Malacca that comes 10,000 miles to Akron to be made into balloon tires so that we may roll around on air. May the goose-neck of Southeast Asia never sink into the sea like a lost Atlantis. It would be too much of a blow, not only to Wall Street and Lombard Street, but to Main Street. (Iliff, 1928: 38)

In 1925, rubber was the US’s top import at £429,000,000 and British Malaya’s foreign trade rose by 448% between 1900 and 1925, that is, from £67,000,000 to £3,000,000,000, because of the demands within the industry. Malayan rubber plantations thus fueled the growth of the world economy and the automobile industry, and their incredible profitability led the British to import mostly Tamil-speaking laborers from South India by the tens of thousands to work as tappers, the majority of whom were absorbed into the new nation-state in the second half of the century. ⁸

However, the staggering wealth propelled by commodities grown and extracted in the colony did not equally benefit everyone involved in the enterprise. Malaya’s rubber exports led to increased spending especially on non-essential items such as automobiles, cigarettes, and cotton in Malaya. In 1925, Malaya imported goods worth USD 62,000,000 from Britain, and USD 16,000,000 from the United States, but notably, this increase in spending was to fill the needs and desires of the planter class rather than the laborers (Barrons, 1926). Laborers from India found that they continued to experience low wages, insecure and unfair contractual terms, privation, and abuse at the hands of not only white colonial planters but also of the Indian kanganies or overseers because the plantations were governed by similar management structures used to organize slave labor in the Caribbean. In other words, while the rubber plantation came to symbolize modernization and industrialization in the early twentieth century, and it brought in new wealth and social mobility for the planters and the migrant laborers from India, rubber also introduced far greater income and social inequalities.

Rubber’s profit margins introduced income inequality that contributed to creating greater and more pronounced cultural differences between not only the white colonial classes and the Malay, Chinese, and Indian colonized subjects, but also within the individual racial communities. Because the colonial subjects who provided the manual labor needed to extract wealth from the land far outnumbered white British colonial functionaries and their planters, local elites from each group who spoke the languages of the laborers were recruited to manage those in the lower ranks. But as local middle-ranking managers and supervisors adopted new cosmopolitan languages, education, and skills beyond what common laborers had access to, they began to see themselves as culturally distinct from those they oversaw:

Natesan Panevelu described his social isolation when he worked as a clerk and Tamil teacher between 1928 and 1930 on the relatively small Bajan Pasir Estate near Teluk Anson. He earned $55 per month, a “very big salary in those days” which set him apart from the “very simple . . . very poor” Tamil laborers. In his eyes, estate life was “boring” because he had no friends: “I cannot go to the laborers, it is very difficult.” Differences of status weighed more heavily than similarity of language and religion. (Lees, 2017: 206)

The status that accrued to the kangany class created new forms of cultural dislocations. Those who were part of the overseer class now belonged to a different social world even though they were still part of the same racial and linguistic groups. The opportunities, tastes, and lifestyles that class position afforded them informed how they conceptualized their place in the world and influenced how they related to others within their ethnic community. ⁹ Class position produced class consciousness that stratified the community from within, in addition to the inter-racial differences between white and nonwhite groups, and between Indian and Malay or Chinese.

Educated Tamils may have been eager to distance themselves from the lower classes within their communities because the predominant colonial stereotypes typified the Indian worker as “simple, ignorant, illiterate, resourceless” (as quoted in Carter, 2008: 17), and these stereotypes have continued into the postcolonial era as Samarasan’s novel exemplifies. Racial stereotypes emerged as a result of class consciousness produced by colonial capitalism. British colonial racial stereotypes of the Indian laborer led to a heightened awareness of class difference within the Indian community, and racial affinity under these conditions had the uncanny effect of emphasizing the gulf between the educated and uneducated Tamils even as they all labored under, and in the service of, European capitalism. Now making up about 10% in Malaysia’s multiethnic and multilingual population, the Indian Malaysian community continues to be divided by language, gender, religion, but especially by class. ¹⁰ Even though caste differences as they exist in India were not reproduced in the Indian communities that settled in Malaysia, Indian Malaysian communities created their own hierarchies based on the interactions and overlaps between race, class, language, and culture. ¹¹

Today, the rubber plantations still have a significant place in Malaysia’s national and racial imaginary, and they remind us that class divisions were produced under the same historical and political conditions that also instituted racial demarcations. Class difference is perhaps so persistent in postcolonial Malaysia because the rubber plantations played such an important role in Malaya’s economic development in the first-half of the twentieth century. The decline of rubber after the Great Depression in the 1930s and the Second World War in the 1940s did not translate into either the spatial erasure of the plantations, or the social effects it had already imprinted on Malayan society. The fall of rubber as a major commodity in the global market moreover had the effect of forcing many of its laborers to migrate from rural areas to urban centers where much of the Indian population remains trapped in the lower classes, but now as part of the urban poor. ¹²

Samarasan’s novel figures these class tensions as resulting from the uneven experience of national liberation in Malaya in the postwar period as bildungsroman because the growth of the Raju’s family—and Chellam’s move from the estates to the town—is set against the birth and development of the postcolonial nation-state. The novel of formation or the bildungsroman is a particularly ironic choice because the social structure between the white planter and his laborers on the rubber plantation were explicitly paternal where the laborer was seen as a child in need of discipline and oversight (Jain, 1970: 286). The social relations of colonial racial difference now manifest as postcolonial class difference; in both situations, however, the laborer is infantilized and has to be schooled by the planter-boss.

The significance of wealth gaps and their effects on how we value human life is reflected in the novel’s own recognition that what counts as major or minor is the result of geopolitical considerations and the relationship between wealth and power. For example, Samarasan cannot expect her readers to know that Malaya/Malaysia is located at the equator, and thus begins the novel by locating the lesser-known Southeast Asian country that “[stretches] delicate as a bird’s head from the thin neck of the Kra Isthmus” in the South China Sea. Within a single sentence, the omniscient narrator’s eye moves from the map to the streets of the city of Ipoh in the north. Narrative focus turns from the plat of the bird’s head to “the violent silver ropes” of a tropical rainstorm, “one corner shop, one bus stop, occasional lorries,” and finally, to “the Big House, number 79, whose bright blue bulk has dominated Kingfisher Lane since it was an unpaved track with nothing else along it but saga trees” (Samarasan, 2008: 2). Perspectival shifts enlarge objects and subjects as they appear on the page as the narrative focus turns from the globe to the city, street, house, and finally, to the two daughters in the home. The novel’s opening draws our attention to what we might otherwise miss: a minor country, town, and two otherwise unimportant girls, one of whom will suffer an untimely, unnoticed demise because she is too dark, too female, and most importantly, too poor. However, the novel also demonstrates that class as culture also overlaps with another popular if unacknowledged belief about the properties of class, that is, class as something that is innate. Like race and gender, class can be assumed—erroneously—to be natural or unchanging. Chellam is believed to be incontrovertibly different from Uma not merely because she is from the wrong part of town, but because class origins are presumed to be an indication of social worth.

Class identity as primordial

Class remains fundamental to the social conflicts that form the plot’s central tensions where internalized classism cannot be untangled from internalized racism. The belief that class position is innate and cannot be changed in a fundamental way has far-reaching consequences that conceive the wealthy and the poor as being identifiable by their tastes, behavior, and skin color. Raju and Vasanthi unconsciously repeat colonial, classist forms of relations in their interactions with Chellam who coincidentally is the same age as Uma, their eldest daughter. Chellam who is darker, smaller, and who had the misfortune of being born on a rubber plantation is not only economically but also intellectually and morally inferior to their daughter. Class distinctions in the novel have particularly egregious effects because the different characters mobilize class difference to explain why one character or the other behaves poorly and cannot be trusted, or whose words should not be believed.

For example, even after her engagement and marriage to Raju, Vasanthi cannot escape minor reminders that her family’s poverty is visible on her body: “[Raju’s mother] had greeted Amma at the front door with a curve to her lips that Amma had almost interpreted as a smile—perhaps she’d passed the old lady’s tests after all?—until she spoke: ‘My goodness,’ she said, ‘red really doesn’t suit a girl of your color, Vasanthi’” (p. 91). Vasanthi’s innocuous choices become evidence of her bloodline, and her bloodline is catachresis for her moral character. A girl with the proper class background, the grandmother implies, would have correct understandings of fashion and propriety without having to be taught. Vasanthi herself internalizes these statements and repeats them in her interactions with Chellam.

Class identity as a primordial quality is especially prominent in the novel’s representations of women and girls who grow up, fall in love, and marry, or in Chellam’s case, fail to do so. Chellam’s origins in the rubber estates first set her apart from the family for whom she works as a live-in maid because her use of language, manners, tastes, and aspirations come off poorly in comparison to Uma’s. And while Uma does not experience complete freedom either even though she is the favored, eldest child, Chellam suffers greater restrictions and censure in comparison. The similarities or differences in the two girls’ physical appearances and sexual desirability emphasize the significance of class status as the girls grow to become women. Their closeness in age heightens the class differences that are literally marked on their bodies and the sound of their voices. Uma’s skin is lighter in shade, smooth, and free of marks. She carries herself with confidence, and her education is displayed in her elocution. Uma is also assumed to eventually marry while Chellam suffers public ridicule for speaking about marriage, love, or romance. Chellam, the servant, is physically unlike and inferior to Uma, and Uma is universally adored while Chellam is not. Their sexual maturity parallels their growth in psychological maturity, but this growth is far from being a pleasant or celebrated process for either Chellam or Uma as they discover the unspoken rules that determine who is allowed to fall in love with whom, and how even innocent romantic feelings and sexual desires can be fraught with danger. The two adolescent girls learn that not all women are free to express either sexual desire or a desire for marriage, and it is this knowledge that marks the early part of their development from childhood to adulthood.

Growth and development are described in explicitly sexual and gendered terms because female sexual maturity can be a threat to patriarchal values. In contrast to the girls and women in the novel, Raju wields the social capital that comes with class and gender. He experiences neither shame nor restrictions in his sexual adventures and because he is a man, class difference does not impede and instead fuels his sexual desires. After a series of dalliances with more educated and sophisticated women, Raju marries the (poor) girl next door, and in response to his mother’s horror at his choice, asserts the right to decide on the basis that he, and not his mother, owns the family wealth.

Marriage at first seems to reconcile the class differences between the rich man and the poor girl as it takes place at the end of British colonialism in Malaya. The woman from the lower classes is lifted from poverty and realizes the promise of upward mobility symbolized by the creation of the new nation-state. But not long after, it becomes apparent that their marriage breaks down because the meaning of class and social capital, and how to acquire more of it, is neither consistent nor overlapping for Raju and Vasanthi. As male and female, they each understand—and value—the social capital that comes with economic position in ways particular to their own gendered experiences of the world, and the unexpected culmination of Raju’s and Vasanthi’s romance in marriage is revealed to be an escapist fantasy for both of them. Class difference remained irreconcilable.

The marriage as a reconciliation of class difference cannot succeed because it does not recognize and acknowledge the power differentials assigned to each gender. Class difference in their unequal romance and marriage heightens and confirms Raju’s paternalistic masculinity, and the patriarchal values, he subscribes to was what first drew him to Vasanthi:

in front of him, he saw [Vasanthi’s] hungry luminous eyes, and in them, he recognized at once what he had longed for all this time, what had been lacking in the attentions of Lily and Claudine and Nalini: gratitude. This girl was grateful to him, had been grateful from the day he’d first rescued her from her father’s house for four hours, and would, if he played his cards right, be forever grateful. (p. 55)

Raju is sexually attracted to Vasanthi not merely because she appeared to be simple, innocent, and morally virtuous, but because the romance and the marriage that followed would establish love as a project of social uplift in which the man has the ability to correct past social wrongs. Marriage, for Raju, was a fantasy that the postcolonial male elite could erase class difference by rescuing the third-world woman still held back by unequal class structures through “his own power to exalt and educate” (p. 93). Upward mobility, in this instance, is conceived as a distinctly male undertaking on patriarchal terms. “Growth” and “development” are gendered terms not only because men and women are viewed differently when they belong to different classes, but also because they had different access to wealth historically, and achieved upward mobility through different routes. Men advance by getting the right education, and women advance by getting the right husband.

However, Raju discovers that he is mistaken about the marriage and misreads Vasanthi’s dependence on him because she—rather than him—has a more nuanced understanding of class politics; the effects of class can be better seen from below. Vasanthi escapes poverty on her own terms, that is, by leveraging her marriage to a rich man. She moreover proves that the quickest route to acquire social standing and cultural capital for a woman is through the performance of classist attitudes, thus further accounting for why class consciousness can be so difficult to dislodge. Fashion, as opposed to education, and social connections, as opposed to personal intimacy, are what secure for her respect in their community, and eventually, power in the family. She learns to perform wealth, and her performance perpetuates the very oppression from which she desires to escape:

They were waiting for her to show her low-class roots; she would do nothing of the sort. She acquired a servant-addressing voice, somehow both crisp and languid, at once high and muted. She learned to call Mat Din Driver instead of by his name. As long as she could avoid Paati’s eyes, even she was convinced by her metamorphosis. (p. 102)

If body, speech, and action are marked by class, Vasanthi demonstrates that one can move from one class position to another by performing a new, more desirable self.

But, she also realizes that while the rights of marriage give her access to the right fashions, hair care, hobbies, company, and habits, the threat of punishment hangs over her head if she should falter in her performance. Vasanthi is neither independent nor a moral exemplar in the novel which refuses to give us an easy resolution in this battle of the sexes because her choices reflect the limitations that economic class position places on women especially. Her passage from girl to woman is mediated precisely by the same norms and assumptions about class and propriety that she later imposes on her own daughters, and also on Chellam. If Vasanthi’s transformation was premised on her ability to perform class difference, class difference would also ultimately ensure that she never attains full, or true freedom.

Vasanthi’s hopes that she will be considered an equal—or more importantly, that she will be loved and recognized by husband, children, and mother-in-law—are frustrated because she discovers that, while class may be performed, her origins cannot be fully erased or negated. She wrongly assumes that with the birth of their first daughter, Uma, she will finally be included into the family. Instead, she finds that she is compared unfavorably to her daughter who, born into the family’s wealth, is the “hero child in a folktale” (p. 105), while Vasanthi is “still the interloper, the bloody clerk’s daughter from next door” (p. 100). Like the color of one’s skin or the shape of one’s eyes, she experiences class difference as if it is an innate part of her identity that remains constant and unchanging. By the same token, Uma and Chellam are guaranteed or barred from class privileges from birth, and that little can be done to change those privileges.

The process of development in the novel is consequently a journey of learning that our experiences in this world cannot escape the taint—or privilege—of class. As each girl goes through the traumatic events that mark their transition from girl to woman, they begin to resemble one another in a comparison based on their similarities, but those similarities also emphasize the divide between them that is the result of class difference:

[Chellam has] turned into an echo of Uma. A diluted version, with duller skin, slumpier shoulders, and a pocked face. Nevertheless, the fact remains: eight months ago they had nothing in common but their age, and now they are alike. Their ruinous silence fills the jumbled rooms and labyrinthine corridors of the Big House; their footsteps quiet, their eyes bottomless, they fade like ghosts whenever anyone turns to look at them. (p. 220)

Uma withdraws and becomes despondent because of her father’s molestation, and Chellam, because she is falsely accused of prostitution, of having a baby out of wedlock, and finally of murder. However, Uma’s trauma remains private and hidden, and her dignity protected, while Chellam is publicly humiliated by the rumors that circulate about her alleged transgressions.

In this milieu, women of the lower classes risk public shaming when they desire marriage, romance, or sexual encounters for the upward mobility they promise, but as Chellam discovers, those from the lower classes can suffer greater censure for smaller, or even imaginary, vices. The novel does not pit one girl’s suffering against another’s, but the girls cannot avoid learning that they inhabit different ranks in society because they are treated according to gender and class positions. Because respect is accorded on the basis of wealth, class position determines each character’s experiences of daily life, and consequently sets the parameters for the passage from childhood into adulthood. They learn not only that class position determines one’s worth and social experiences, but also that in order to function in their societies, they need to perform to class expectations.

Class as bildung

By the end of the novel, Chellam and the other children are portrayed as reaching psychological maturity when they demonstrate that they are able to understand, and comply with, the unwritten codes of behavior that are proper to each class. In other words, each girl is depicted as “acting out” because they are at first ignorant of what the world expects from them. But finally, they grow or develop because they are forced to learn and respond to the social cues that mark the customs and norms that organize class position. All the children in the novel eventually learn that there are unspoken but normalized beliefs about class boundaries that govern individual actions. Where they belong in the class hierarchy can influence what counts as “proper” behavior as well as how their actions are interpreted.

Until Chellam—or Uma’s younger siblings, Suresh and Aasha—demonstrates that they are aware of how economic position organizes family, society, and the interactions between each social class, they are considered too young or too foolish to be taken seriously. The adult characters in the novel are not free to escape the constraints of class on their behaviors either. Those who do not behave appropriately, that is, in accordance with the cultural norms of their class, are shown to be either irresponsible (Balu), irrational (Raju), or insane (Kooky Rooky). Conformity to class norms distinguishes “normal” adults from everyone else.

All the girls experience an accelerated maturation because the inability to decipher class rules and politics can result in censure or discipline. Aasha learns this firsthand at the age of four when she misreads an altercation between her uncle, Balu, who confronts Raju about his molestation of Uma. Raju responds by evicting his brother from the Big House and instead falsely accuses Balu himself of being sexually interested in Uma. Aasha, who overhears their argument, comes to the conclusion that her sister intends to marry their uncle. She misreads because she is still in the early stages of psychological development, and also because she cannot correctly interpret Balu’s impotence as a function of his dependence on the charity of his older brother. Aasha confuses perpetrator and victim because she is unable to decipher the class politics that inform each brother’s behavior and responses, and in the process, unintentionally provokes Uma’s anger and the beginning of the sisters’ estrangement:

“Aasha,” she said, and her voice was as soft as Amma’s was at dangerous times, “shut up. You’re not a baby anymore.”

And at that moment, just as the minute hand on the hall clock touched six, Aasha ceased to be a baby. The dimples in her knees smoothed themselves out. The creases in her thighs sizzled and melted. Her knuckles turned bony. Her forehead flattened.

Uma, too, grew up over the following months. (p. 306)

The girls in the novel find their place as they learn to accept their social position in the world, and as they become schooled in the limits that gender and class place on them. Uma is transformed by her father’s molestation and her grandmother’s subsequent betrayal because she discovers that money and power are foundational even to kinship. The grandmother’s refusal to acknowledge her son’s wrongdoing leads to an irrevocable break between grandmother and granddaughter because Uma realizes that she has been betrayed by her father’s and grandmother’s desires to maintain the fiction that they remain a respectable middle-class family.

However, that class consciousness plays a central role in the process of formation shows up most clearly in Aasha’s and Chellam’s sudden and accelerated jumps from childhood to adulthood, especially when Aasha, the youngest child in the family, witnesses the sequence of events that leads to the death of the grandmother and accuses Chellam of being responsible for it. She accuses Chellam of delivering the blow that ends the grandmother’s life out of a misguided love for her older sister who unknowingly causes the grandmother’s death in a moment of anger. But this almost premature disclosure also points the novel’s readers to the deeper antagonism that revolves around Raju’s molestation of Uma.

Aasha’s accusation of the wrong girl in the grandmother’s death marks the moment when she thinks she has become an adult, and it is a transformation that the novel describes as equally ironic and bathic because it takes place when Aasha is 6 years old. By this point in the novel, Raju’s affair with a working-class Chinese Malaysian woman has led him to all but abandon his family and his absence relegates his frail mother to the care of Chellam and Vasanthi’s indifferent oversight. Betrayed by both father and grandmother, Uma has become silent in the home. Aasha and her brother, Suresh, are left to their own devices.

Through her actions and her words, Aasha demonstrates that she finally understands where her “true” responsibilities and loyalties lie, that is with Uma rather than Chellam who is unconnected to her either by blood or class, thus leading Aasha to make her fateful pronouncement:

“Chellamservant pushed Paati.” [Aasha] doesn’t turn to look at Chellam as she hisses the s of servant, nor after, in the perfect silence that ensues. She doesn’t need to; she needs no external validation of this moment of triumph, in which, with three steel-bright words, she has (1) punished Chellam (for Leading Us On, for Pretending to Love Us like siblings in hopes of a salary and then withdrawing her fakery when we could not pay her price), and (2) saved Uma. (p. 158)

Aasha’s emphasis on the sibilance of the word “servant” indicates the resolution of her formerly divided loyalties. Class difference, rather than a real belief in Chellam’s culpability, becomes the rationale behind her decision. The derogatory sobriquet “Chellamservant” which joins the nature of the work to the person who performs that work, is a childish insult that Aasha and her brother Suresh use among themselves, and it exemplifies the children’s conflicting attitudes toward class difference. Even though they are old enough to know that they are forbidden to refer to Chellam as a servant, they are still young enough to feel confused by the social distinctions class introduces into their relationships. Is Chellam an employee, or is she an older sister? The children’s affection is an emotion that they cannot explain nor speak of because they recognize implicitly that those emotions are somehow transgressive because they cross class lines.

By referring to Chellam’s position in the household as “servant,” Aasha and Suresh distance themselves from her, and despite the affection they feel toward Chellam, or perhaps because of this, they learn to accentuate the cultural differences between the positions of “child” and “servant”:

They hate her coconut hair oil and her hairy armpits and her crushes on fat Tamil actors with moles; they hate her broken English, to which they sometimes stoop in mockery; they hate her T-shirts that came free with Horlicks and Kandos chocolates. They hate all the evidence of her rubber-estate tastes: the shiny polyester blouse she wears to run errands in town, the gaudy flowers she puts in her hair before going out, the chipped, pillar-box-red Cutex on her fingernails. (p. 252)

But more than any of these, they hate her father . . . Who is proof of Chellam’s dubious origins and the regrettable traits that are In Her Blood. (p. 253)

Like Vasanthi, Chellam’s class position is visibly marked on her hair, body, voice, clothes, and in her likes and dislikes. Both women are also similarly haunted by a poor father whose actions shame them in front of Raju’s family and their neighbors. And both women cannot escape the effects of class consciousness despite the 20-year gap between them.

Aasha’s accusation clarifies and reifies the class boundaries and identity between family and “servant,” thus marking her passage into adulthood. Her actions are motivated first and foremost by her anger and desire to “punish” Chellam for what ostensibly turns out to be what she sees as class betrayal (“for Pretending to Love Us like siblings in hopes of a salary”) because the affections she feels is a part of the labor Chellam performs. And second, Aasha herself identifies her accusation as a significant moment when she “grows up” and is part of her self-actualization: “But try as she might to see such a creature in the mirror, Aasha feels less like a baby than she ever has. She’s all grown up; she has a secret she’ll never tell, and no one to answer to but herself” (p. 173). It is unclear if the protagonist feels “grown up” because she has punished Chellam; has told a lie; keeps the lie a secret; or if the entire experience gives her a sense of acting as a self-directed individual with “no one to answer to but herself.” What seems clear to Aasha, however, is that the far-reaching consequences of her lie are immaterial because Chellam is “only” a servant.

Kwame Anthony Appiah argues that class identity has been the predominant way human beings find their sense of self, and that the effects of class on identity are even more enduring than either race, religion, or nationalism. Class introduces hierarchies that are so resilient they can continue for generations and these distinctions cannot be ignored even if we should disdain them because they have become a fundamental way by which the value of personhoods is determined:

That’s because one of the central human goods is respect: both self-respect and the respect of others . . . Understanding a society’s codes entails grasping what kinds of facts about people are seen to entitle them to this positive attitude and to the corresponding forms of “respectful” treatment. (Appiah, 2018: 154)

Class hierarchy endures because sociality is defined by the giving and receiving of proper consideration due to each individual’s place within that hierarchy. These marks of respect are codified in our customs that are felt and normalized in daily life even if they remain unwritten and unconscious.

Consequently, to be “minor” is to be aware of one’s proper place and of the unspoken moral codes that govern those in that position. The novel describes Chellam’s growth from girl to woman in more explicitly classist terms especially when it is compared to the two sisters. She creates conflicts within the family because she misunderstands or is ignorant of the social rules and norms, and is drawn into the family’s disputes because she misreads social signs. But Raju, Vasanthi, and the children attribute these disruptions to Chellam’s class origins rather than mere ignorance; rather, she is rude, careless, or foolish precisely because she is from the rubber estates, and her insensitivity to when she should speak or stay silent is mark of her cultural and social otherness. The ignorance of class difference is itself an affront, and a sign of class difference itself.

Chellam’s greatest fault is her apparent disregard for the codes of conduct associated with “servant,” and the false accusation Aasha levels at Chellam not only signals Aasha’s growing awareness and understanding of proper class loyalties and conduct, but also teaches Chellam that she cannot live or act freely outside of class boundaries. To cross class lines is to risk social expulsion because it risks destabilizing the relations of power within the community. Ironically, the event that is the turning point of Chellam’s life is but a minor event when compared to the other abuses she has suffered: “When she returns, the smile’s been wiped off her face, never to re-appear in quite the same sunny hue, for she brings with her news that is not for smiling at. News whose reception and dissemination will forever change her place in the Big House” (p. 264, emphasis mine). She has accidentally crossed paths with Raju in the mundane ritual of purchasing provisions with his mistress at the local market, and the life-changing event is not the discovery of Raju’s indiscretion, but because she reports it to the family. Because she conveys information that disrupts the family’s own image of itself as “respectable” and “traditional,” Chellam unwittingly crosses and destabilizes class boundaries in the home beyond repair.

The revelations of moral transgressions in this case matters so much because they potentially change how each person acts in response to another and what each can or cannot do within the home. Those who reveal truth can wield great power. Chellam’s ignorance of the coded behaviors— and by implication, these codes would have needed no explanation if she belonged to the middle-class—in her tale-bearing is not merely a social faux pas that results in laughter or mockery. The narration identifies this minor moment as the event that “forever changes” her place in the house because when she crosses class lines in this instance, she effectively abrogates power to herself and consequently, has to be punished for it. By revealing the affair, Chellam reveals her own ignorance that unspoken social codes of class govern who can say what, and when, but also unintentionally shifts the power relations within the household.

The public shame Vasanthi experiences also causes Chellam to lose even the favor and trust of the youngest children because they possess greater class consciousness than she does. While Chellam remains ignorant of the magnitude of her trespass, they are aware of its effects even if they cannot explain them:

No matter how much Amma wants to fall down on the kitchen floor and weep, she cannot, she will not, cry in front of a servant. Even if Chellam stopped now, it would be too late. Suresh’s and Aasha’s grudging affection for her has shifted imperceptibly, for while servant girls may be caught red-handed . . . they must never do the catching themselves. Yet Chellam doesn’t seem to rein herself in; her skin itches with what she’s seen, and her eyes are dry with its heat. “Got childrens also!” she cries, her voice rising. (p. 265)

That Chellam has heard Raju’s mixed-race children call him the Chinese word for father (“Pa”) while Vasanthi’s own darker-hued children call him father in Tamil (“Appa”) —the difference of a mere syllable that symbolizes a cultural gulf—is received as a greater insult because it is conveyed by a “Rubber-estate tattletale” (Samarasan, 2008: 268), and Vasanthi feels humiliated by the descriptions of the contents in the mistress’ shopping bag because the news is delivered in Tamil-inflected English. Vasanthi must not succumb to emotion “in front of a servant,” and while it might be marginally acceptable for “servant girls” to be caught in acts of vice—acceptable because their vice reveals their baser nature—they must not speak of the vices of their betters. In other words, the revelation of Raju’s secret had cataclysmic effects because it was delivered by someone from the lower class. Class politics is thus inherently conservative in nature because an action or speech is socially acceptable insofar as it recognizes and protects the social order in which it appears.

Each child depicted in this novel is shown to reach maturity when they finally comprehend the social expectations inherent to racial and class divisions and therefore adopt the behaviors and speech appropriate to their class. Chellam finally learns to stay silent when Aasha accuses her of causing the grandmother’s death, but her realization is a belated one when compared to the other children. Her silence at the end signals that she too has become an adult when she becomes aware that class position influences unspoken assumptions about conduct and behavior. If the bildungsroman involves a forward momentum toward advancement and maturity, it is a genre that also envisions how one ceases to be a literal “minor.” To cease to be a minor is to accept the limits of class. In the novel’s depiction of Chellam, the ill-fated girl from the rubber-estates, the drive toward psychological development takes the form of a relentless and unavoidable journey toward understanding how class is a central category through which human life is organized. For our politics of resistance to be effective, it has to first confront the traction class has in our cultures.

Balu is the only other character in the novel who attempts to cross class lines, but unlike the children, he exhibits a greater awareness of the risks that he takes. On his final visit to the family 2 years after Raju molests his daughter, he finds his mother suddenly aged and under the care of Chellam, whom he notices is “exhausted and underfed” (p. 229), and Uma is but a shadow of her former self. Upon discovering that Chellam receives none of her wages, he devises small chores for which he can pay her but cautions her to keep it a secret: “he really doesn’t want her to mention it, not to the other servants, not to the children, not to their parents, and he doesn’t know why, apart from his determination not to be seen minding anything that could in any way be construed as someone else’s business” (p. 238, emphasis mine). He recognizes that his acts of kindness could be misinterpreted, and Raju and Chellam’s father do in fact jump to the conclusion that Balu’s acts of charity are sexually motivated. Acts that do not keep to class lines are easily read as moral infractions that call for public shaming.

Class lines are consequently crossed at the transgressor’s own peril because they risk expulsion from the community. Uma’s grandmother stays silent about the molestation in order to keep the family intact. Balu also gives up his early attempts to confront his brother: “He may be a man of integrity, but this time, for once, he is resolved not to be the one who sees too much. He too can feign innocence and short memory; he can wash his hands of other people’s causes and mind his own business” (p. 229, emphasis mine). In the end, the minor refrain “Not my fault” is transposed into “Not my business.” Both disavow any responsibility for the family’s disintegration, but they also perform the class privilege that distinguishes lower classes from those above them. Chellam acquiesces to the constraints of her class position when she realizes that it would have been futile to protest the accusation leveled at her because she would not be believed anyway. Balu’s “Not my business” re-establishes the class boundaries that set Chellam apart from the other children in the house. While the thought remains private and unspoken, Balu is aware that he can take responsibility for another only at the cost of his own reputation and respectability within his own social world.

Instead, Balu and his mother choose to remain on the peripheries of the family unit rather than tear it apart: the grandmother retreats into a decaying body and mind, and he leaves the Big House never to return. Unlike Chellam, Balu and his mother are well schooled in the social costs of speaking the truth. And unlike Chellam, he demonstrates that while he may be a poor relative, he remains very much a part of the middle class because he—unlike her—knows what “his own business” is, and what it is not. To be part of a social group is to recognize and respond to the codes of responsibilities—and rights—that are unwritten and informal, but that nonetheless carry grave social consequences.