- The presence of the Indian diaspora in Malaysia since the late 19th century has seen many changes to the constitution of a community that transplanted itself in new surroundings, equipped with a certain amount of cultural paraphernalia of the ancestral land, India. The journey through the many pathways of the adopted land has etched an intricate pattern of the Malaysian Indian self. K. S. Maniam, a writer of Indo-Malaysian descent, has thus far produced a number of imaginative writings that deal, for the most part, with such intricacies of the Indo-Malaysian experience. However, the borders of his imagination do not taper inwards into that ethnic community that he grew up amongst. At certain junctures, they edge out of the perimeters of the compound of the Indo-Malaysian world, into the territories of the other communities sharing the same soil. This constitution, when looked at symbolically, shapes itself into a kolam, an art form that is unique to the Indian community. Since the borders of the artist's imagination are malleable though, the kolam that arises does not solely loop in upon itself (or in a larger sense its Indian centre) like the one depicted in the following passage from his short story "Haunting the Tiger" : "The oblong hall is unrelieved except for a massive old cupboard and his mother's kolams on the dark cement floor. These cabala-like designs in white, looped in upon themselves, drive him into further fury" (Maniam 1996, 39). Maniam may sculpt his characters with the grains from the receptacle of an imagination that is rooted in a predominantly Indian world-view, yet, the soil that nurtures it contains other entities. What I plan to show in this paper is that the design that is reflected from his writings is one that forms an amalgamation of the various social realities that are experienced by the diasporic Indian in Malaysia. This design is especially evident in his second novel, In a Far Country (1994).
- In A Far Country (1994) tests the borders of the Indo-Malaysian experience. It is a chronicle of Rajan, an Indo-Malaysian, whose self-interrogation of his past, takes him back into the country of the mind, where he meets a myriad of characters from his past, individuals from all walks of life and ethnic divisions. Almost all of them are bound by a common quest for a home. The metaphor of the kolam chosen thus becomes deeply symbolic to In A Far Country, for that Indian art form is normally drawn at the entrance to a home to invite harmony within. Rajan, the protagonist of the novel, seeks entrance into a harmonious home in a far country, learning that it is only possible when there is a conscious effort to reach out to the other cultures, especially the host culture, the Malay culture. In the end, one can collate his imaginative outpourings and find that they culminate in a kolam that he places at the entrance of his home, with the hope that it will invite harmony within.
- The artist of the Indian kolam normally begins by drawing a series of dots on the floor, which are then consequently embellished by a pattern of uninterrupted lines. The kolam of Maniam's imagination however does not originate from a single uninterrupted line, for his is an interrupted history. The very line that connects him to the original land of the kolam is already disrupted. What happens then to a cultural emblem when it is reconstructed in a different country and consequently, a different environment? Steven Vertovec's (1992) argument on this very issue, within the context of the Indo-Caribbean diaspora, can perhaps best answer this question. He envisions
cultural phenomena as being continuously reproduced in discourse with social/economic/political surroundings. These surroundings themselves are usually in flux, so that the process of cultural reproduction within such conditions often yields some form of modification. (Vertovec 1992, x)
- The kolam that arises from Maniam's imagination is one that yields to its reproduction in a country far from a motherland. It is reconstituted to reflect the discourse with the surroundings that Vertovec mentions above. The artist who reassembles it is of the diaspora of its original motherland. Hence, even though the kolam may be Indian in origin, its reproduction in that far country does not merely loop in upon its Indian centre but rather unfurls towards other territories in its new setting. The result is a kolam with malleable margins. A comment that Maniam makes in his introduction to a collection of short stories reinforces further the theory behind my argument of the malleable kolam:
- It has been established that the roots of the kolam are undoubtedly Indian in nature. Rajan inherits the bedrock of Indian culture from his father, who belongs to the generation of the pioneer Indian emigrants to colonial Malaya, disassociated limbs of a distant Motherland, India. Hence, his memory of his father becomes the first grain that is placed on the floor of his imagination. That individual grain is then joined by other grains, connected to the long lineage of the diasporic Indian experience in Malaysia, first conceived when the pioneer Indian immigrants were brought over in the 19th century to labour upon the various road and railway networks as well as the many plantations. It is this inheritance that frames the imagination. Yet, it is a frame that is itself quite unstable, since it is caught up in the lacerated body of the diasporic Indian consciousness. It is a body that succours on ‘despair inherited through the blood' and memories of ‘another country, India; the time, another era….'(4). Thus, when Rajan conjures up those inherited memories, it is patterned with the failed dreams of that generation. These failed dreams are very much similar to those of other Indian diasporic communities. For instance, Vijay Mishra (1992), commenting on the Indian diaspora in Fiji, highlights an argument from "Indo-Fijian Fiction: Towards an Interpretation"(1977) which
connected an identifiable Indian indenture consciousness with failed millenarian expectations. This consciousness, it was argued, arose out of the initial period of "servitude" which cumulatively for this fragment, spanned some forty years, between 1879 and 1917. It was also argued that this millenarianism itself was a consequence of a cultural fossilization that necessitated a reading of history in terms of an unfulfilled past subsequently endowed with a fullness, a completion, which it never had. This explained the ambiguity of the Rama-rajya syndrome- the fact that in the Kingdom of Rama left behind the millenarian had found a complete, unproblematic expression. (Mishra 1992,3-
It is an argument that is relevant to the plight of the Indian diaspora in Malaysia, as represented in In A Far Country. The cultural fossilisation that Mishra talks about is evident in the compound of the estate that Rajan's family lived in, one thatwas already prepared for their security and cultural continuity.
The temple and the toddy shop were landmarks of this tradition. My father's red and bleary eyes revealed the discontent that overpowered him at the end of his life. Why had he given up? Didn't the temple and the toddy shop satisfy him? The first Englishman who thought of tall, swaying trees that produced the toddy and temple tucked away in a remote corner on the estate, must have seen pastoral existence without cynicism. My father's puffy cheeks and premature grey hair traced the history of cynicism which soured the very centre of that tropical paradise: nira, the manna from the skies and the god's chariot stored away in a dusty, dilapidated nook of the temple! (42)
- The temple and the toddy shop become the ‘fossilised fragment of the original nation' (Mishra 1992,2). The nira is, to quote Mishra once more, the ‘the myth of a fulfilment in the future' that continually defers ‘the real historical moment' and hence ‘[t]he fossilized fragment seeks renewal through a paradoxical refossilization of itself' (Mishra 1992,2). Muniandy or Andy as he is addressed, another Indo-Malaysian character in the novel, is a clear example of this fossilisation, for similarly a victim to a failed millenarian quest, he shuts himself off within the smokehouse in the estate. He seemed, to Rajan, to live in ‘enforced suspension of all ambition' existing only for an indecipherable world and ‘the sprawling universes The Ramayana and The Mahabharata created[]'(20). When he died ‘he kept his eyes closed on a world in which he had never found a home' (22). It is precisely this dystopia or anti-utopia (Nandy 1986, 5) that dissatisfies Rajan's father as evident in the passage above and consequently in his ensuing words : Those stars were wrong to bring us here. But how can we stop ourselves from following their pull? Everything is joined together. One land's grass dies, another's jungle is cool and full of fruits. Like blind bats we come to the fruit trees. Then we're caught in the net. (6)
- His last days are spent taut with the knowledge that the land he sleeps in sleeps in turn with its back to him. His expectations were instilled by a great-grandfather who ‘told me many stories. About those stars. How they had guided our travellers, the bold ones in the family, over lands never trodden by feet before. Ah, those men carrying their boats overland, passing through sandalwood-scented forests.'(5) He thought he ‘would find heaven' yet finds himself faced with another form of suffering, worse than the one in India as this one held ‘[n]o escape'(7). who is conscious that margins beyond the failed pastoral ideal promised by the Englishmen had to be transgressed:
"We must leave the estate. We must go the real land." That was what he said the many times we stood at the estate border and looked at the sprawling, hilly land beyond. "We must get to the centre" he said, " all by ourselves"(44)
- He plants the seed within Rajan who ultimately advances beyond the boundary of the isolated Indian world of the estate. He works to transmute the margins that skirt that very compound. Yet, the Indian foundation is not effaced, it makes up much of the design. For, before moving out, the Indo-Malaysian experience is first delineated, with its failed millenarian dreams and its cultural fossilisation. They are grains that are part of his heritage and they must be recorded. Hence, his father might have felt that their lives were ‘just small handfuls of dirt. Dropped into the ocean they just disappeared' (7), yet, on the contrary, they fall into the hands of his son who, like an artist, drops them to form a pattern on his own kolam. The narration that continues constantly drifts back towards this cradle, while simultaneously circling out towards other sources of nourishment. It is in the former that one apprehends the ‘cultural- cross-overs', etched on the surface of the imagination.
- The first progression that transmutes the Indo-Malaysian boundary lines leads to Lee Shin, a Chinese Malaysian. Rajan feels linked to Lee Shin by a common ‘deep-seated desire for a home' (28). Both are inheritors of the cultural consciousness of the diasporic experience, that which comes from a disassociated history. Lee Shin struggles to join the frayed threads of his lineage with furniture imported from his original motherland and also by possessing an imported flute, which Rajan conceives as not ‘of this country'. Lee Shin's words endorse this: ‘Such bamboo instruments…if made out of local materials, would only have a fragility and shortness that come from unrootedness and shallow skills' (39). Lee Shin could be said to represent a Chinese flute that is made out of local materials, born as he is in Malaysia. Failing ‘to destroy time and its many disturbances' with a soothing melody, he is finally unhinged by his own parochialism. Rajan remembers him because he died with the death of a dream in his hands, just like his father. Disillusioned, Rajan moves away from the perimeters of that ill-fated dream and subsequently gains entry into the world of land brokerage, a world that he thought, ‘ finally freed myself from the phase in history that had trapped and killed my father and his generation' (66). He feels suddenly empowered as he can now be in charge of the land that had turned its back on his forebears:
Those remaining years in the town were creative and prosperous. My land aesthetics grow. There was no need, I realized, to get too involved with the land. That only led to despair and futility. The other approach was the saner one: it led to a clean, knowledgeable way of living. Soon the land came to reside within me as some material that could be shaped into whatever it had use for. …This kind of land I didn't even bother about, even in my dreams. (77-78)
- It appears as if he has found a way out of the clutches of the failed millenarian dream. It seems as though the kolam is about to be completed and placed in front of his home. Yet, it as at that crucial moment that he meets two important individuals. The first, Sivasurian, another Indo-Malaysian who, like Rajan and all Indo-Malaysians, comes from the world of a culture transferred onto another land, and the other, Zulkifli, whose lineage is secured to the ancestral ownership of that very land.
- Sivasurian prods Rajan out of his own self-imposed boundaries, urging him to ‘to go back so that you'll know what you are' (89). He leaves him a written legacy which comes to occupy an important place on the floor of Rajan's imagination, for it patterns out the left-over dream of the Indian diaspora, people who were determined to stay in the country that was their host, for ‘ born again', they ‘didn't know of anywhere else. They were in that land that had been chosen for them' (106). His journal speaks of an earlier harmony between the races, where boundaries are merged. Yet, it progresses to the later stage of compartmentalised ethnic groups, each going up onto separate platforms. Reading Sivasurian's account, Rajan realises ‘I seemed to have gone on some stage myself and insisted, in my own way, what I thought life and country should have been' (118). It is this revelation that moves him towards Zulkifli, a son of the soil that had played host to his community for many centuries. Rajan has to bring Zulkifli and his worldview into the design of his kolam. As he asserts, ‘'[t]he borders of my consciousness are still not sufficiently destroyed for me to know the heart of my country. I lie here on my bed, not thinking. I've given up resistance. It was resistance that had prevented me from entering the depths of tiger-land that Zulkifli had promised me' (136-137).
- What proceeds next is a journey of the mind's eye into the hinterland that finally removes the sentry from the outpost of his imagination. The ultimate test is, in the words of, Zulkifli, to ‘moult completely', to leave everything that makes up the self to embrace the mystical tiger, ‘symbol of the quality of Malay life and the Malay vision of the world' (Dr. Watson, afterword). Yet Rajan cannot fully accept the tiger: ‘Something else intervenes: the flesh melting away into something unrecognizable. I turn back. The idea that nothing of me will ever remain appals me' (143). Merging would mean expelling his past, and he is too much a part of it, of his father's dreams and the diasporic experience that has moulded him. It is enough that he is willing to meet with it and to give it a place on the figure of his imagination. It is that final act that renders the borders of his imagination malleable: ‘Now that the mind has no sieve-like barrier erected around it all kinds of images and occurrences pass easily into its territory' (145). Ien Ang (1993), referring to the overseas Chinese experience asserts that " "Chineseness" becomes an open sign which acquires its peculiar forms and contents in dialectical conjunction with the diverse local conditions in which ethnic Chinese people construct new, hybrid identities and communities". Likewise, the Indianness of the kolam becomes an open sign, which acquires different contents through its dialectical conjunction with the diverse local conditions of the new land.
- Holding each image of the adopted land in his hand, Rajan drops them onto the kolam of his making. They become the dots that are outlined and intertwined to form a design that reflects the Malaysian Indian experience. Commencing from a grain that originates from the cradle of the culture that has clothed his community for centuries, Rajan works his way out of the crumbling walls of their antediluvian dreams fossilised within that very fabric. The grains that he finds outside are not of the same shape and size, yet they all find nourishment from the same Malaysian soil. Thus they are gathered up and arranged upon the surface of his imagination, which when collated, forms a kolam which he may place at the entrance of his home in a far country, with hopes that harmony will reside within.
- Ang, Ien. Migrations of Chineseness In Diasporas Edited by Vijay Mishra, SPAN (Journal of the South Pacific Association ofr Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies, Number 34-35, 1993.
- Nandy, Ashis. Traditions, Tyranny and Utopias: Essays in the Politics of Awareness, Oxford University Press, Delhi, 1986.
- Maniam, K. S. ‘Fiction into Fact, Fact Into Fiction: A Personal Reflection' in Kirpal Singh (ed.) The Writer's Sense of the Past, Singapore University Press, 1987, Singapore.
- ---. Haunting the Tiger: Contemporary stories from Malaysia, SKOOB Books, 1996,London.
- ---. In A Far Country, Skoob Books, London, 1994 (reprint of 1993 publication)
- ---. The Return. Skoob Books, London, 1993.
- Mishra, Vijay. ‘The Girmit Ideology Revisited: Fiji Indian Literature' in Nelson, Emmanuel Sampath (ed.) The Literature of the Indian Diaspora, Greenwood Press, Connecticut, 1992.
- Vertovec, Steven. Hindu Trinidad, Macmillan, London, 1992.
- Nandy, Ashis. Traditions, Tyranny and Utopias: Essays in the Politics of Awareness, Oxford University Press, Delhi, 1986.
The counter reality that emerges from these stories includes and builds on the borderland between cultures found in the country. This is the region where there are cultural cross-overs …Haunting the Tiger, the title story, for instance landscapes the interface between a dominant and a migrant culture. (Maniam 1996, xi)In a Far Country almost certainly landscapes those interfaces that Maniam alludes to. They are interfaces that are sought, as aforementioned, to seek a home in a country far from an original motherland. The argument that follows will reveal how this quest arranges itself into a portrait of the imagination as a malleable kolam.
NOTE: Information on the art of the kolam can be found at http://www.uni-koeln.de/philfak/indologie/kolam/preamble/html and at http://www.Tamilnation.org.culture/kolam/html.
WORKS CITED