Paths Less Trodden: Representations of Indian Women Outside the Plantation Frontier in Colonial Malaya in K. S. Maniam’s Fiction

Abstract

This chapter focuses primarily on the female experience of early migrant life in colonial Malaya as conveyed in two texts by K. S. Maniam (1942–2020), his inaugural novel The Return (1981) and his short story, “The Kling-Kling Woman” (Maniam, Yamada (ed.), Virtual Lotus: Modern fiction of Southeast Asia, The University of Michigan Press, 2002). More specifically, it chooses experiences that were formed outside the boundaries of colonial plantations. This is not meant as a dismissal of the plantation experience of Indian women in colonial Malaya, but rather as an attempt to engage with female figures and autonomous experiences that were formed independently of the regimented plantation system of social control and patronage. It argues that in the minutiae of particular episodes related, the edges of the parchment of knowledge on early Indian migrant women takes on different textures, dispelling dominant conventions of the drudgery of plantation labour and offering insights into everyday acts that were as much valid as that of records of roll call, labour productivity, and profit margin. It concludes that what we are given are what was to all intents and purposes, the paths less trodden that saw the making of pioneer female wage earners or “working women” of the Malaysian Indian community. Ultimately the chapter foregrounds the role that fiction can play in imagining the lives of Indian women outside the Plantation frontier in Colonial Malaya.