“TAPPING FORGOTTEN EXPERIENCES”: EXAMINING INDIAN PLANTATION WORKERS’ EXPERIENCES DURING THE JAPANESE OCCUPATION OF MALAYA

Abstract

The Malayan Indian plantation worker’s experience during the Japanese Occupation between 1942 and 1945 is often missing in social memory. This absence exists despite the fact that these labourers comprised the majority of the Malayan Indian population. This thesis argues that the Indian plantation workers were forcibly rounded up by the Japanese because of the wide-spread unemployment that existed in the estates. Besides being primary targets for Japanese press-ganging measures, Indian plantation workers were treated differently than the wider Indian population. The lack of access to Hindi and the physical abuse by the Japanese soldiers and Indian kirani and kangani illustrated how the Indian plantation workers did not receive the same exposure of nationalism nor protection from atrocities. In this sense, the plantation worker remained an isolated figure, which was exacerbated by the remoteness of the plantation estates. This isolated existence contributed to the significant absence of the plantation workers’ experience in the social memory of Occupation. However, this was not only the factor. The relegitimization of the diasporic Indian nationalist movement and the emphasis on linear national narratives for nation-building took priority during the post-war period and resultantly, pushed the Indian plantation labourer’s experience to the peripheries of the Indian and national collective memory of the Occupation. Most importantly, however, there appears to be a deliberate attempt to remove the experience from collective memory by former members of the IIL, suggesting that the nationalist leadership was culpable for the suffering experienced by these labourers.