Forgotten Wars (56 page)

By 1947 rubber production had regained its pre-war peak, and the industry was once again the biggest employer in Malaya: of its 354,694 workers, 221,240 were Indian, mostly Tamils from the south. Although they worked at the heart of the industrial economy, they often lived in isolated frontier areas. The rubber industry was not solely a European creation: it was pioneered by Asian investors and, before the war, Malay smallholders produced just under a half of Malaya’s rubber exports. But European estate managers saw the transformation of vast tracts of the Malayan rainforest into a model industrial garden – trees planted in geometrical lines, the ground drained and weeded – as one of the largest and most indelible monuments to British enterprise in Asia. Much of the human and epidemiological costs of this, however, had been borne by Tamil workers.
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The rubber plantation was one of the most all-encompassing labour regimes on earth. Its hold over the lives of its workers was captured in a documentary novel, by a Frenchman, Pierre Boulle, who worked in Malaya before and after the war. He served as an agent of the Free French in Indo-China, and this provided material for his more famous work,
La Pont de la Rivière Kwaï
. In
Le sacrilège Malais
, Boulle described a relentless routine, set in motion each morning with a ritual summons in the dark, at 4.30 a.m. precisely. Under the savage curses of the
kangany
, the Asian overseer, the men, women and children paraded with knives and shears and buckets. ‘The roll call could have been held an hour later,’ Boulle wrote, ‘only then it would have lost its religious character and been reduced to the level of commonplace utility… The spiritual communion in the dark was intentionally endowed with all the sacred value of holy writ.’ At roll call it was the custom of some British planters, many of whom were veterans of the First World War, to hoist and salute the Union Jack. The tappers, the weeders, the pest gang, the road and drainage gang, each had their daily ‘task’. For the tapper it was to cut the bark of a set number of trees – perhaps as many as 400 a day – to release the sap, and then to
collect the latex that had gathered there since the last incision. This delicate process was subject to minutely governed schedules and techniques. Managers and overseers competed to achieve a ‘mathematic perfection of movement that does away with every redundant gesture’: it even governed bodily necessities – labourers were encouraged to urinate in their buckets to prevent the latex coagulating.
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A large plantation of several thousand acres was an ‘over-governed state’ in which the European
dorai
, or master, was king: the roads, bridges, housing, school, dispensary, shop and cattle herd were all his responsibility.
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There was virtually no aspect of labourers’ lives in which the
dorai
could not intervene, including family disputes, choice of clothing and leisure activities. He was addressed by labourers as ‘our mother and our father’, and sometimes this was literally the case; for European bachelors, as Boulle recorded, the ‘cook’s wife’ was a customary consolation.

Like most systems of work in Malaya, the rubber plantations were designed for single migrant men. Now they were home to families, which in many cases had to be rebuilt from the trauma of war. In 1946 there were 5,591 widows in the rubber industry; 6,795 children left with only one parent, and 2,324 orphans.
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The ‘labour lines’ – terraces of one-room cottages – were often little more than ‘sleeping boxes’ bereft of such basic facilities as running water and privacy. They were nests of neighbourly disputes, and completely unsuited to family life. The fundamental economic reality was that a man’s wages – 70 cents a day – could not support a family. After the war, women and children comprised over 40 per cent of the estate workforce. But women and children were paid at a far lower rate than men for what were often equally hard ‘tasks’. A cost of living allowance brought a man’s wages to $1.10, but this was far below what was paid to Chinese employed through contractors, who could expect at least $2 a day, and maybe where there was demand, $3 or $3.50. The government and employers struggled to justify such discrimination, arguing that the Tamils received free housing and, being physically weaker, were less productive. But behind these arguments lay crude racial typologies: the Chinese were a ‘pushing, hard-working, independent people’; the Tamil, on the other hand, ‘looks for security and a settled life, and has little ambition because of his background, going back
three thousand years, which has given him his caste and position in life’.
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Young Tamils were trapped in a cycle of poverty and low expectations. In 1947 the labour code was amended to raise the minimum age for child labour to eight years, for light agricultural and horticultural work. There were 25,000 Indian children at work on Malaya’s plantations: schools on estates were of woeful quality, and few children attended them beyond the age of ten. ‘It is because of their poverty’, an Indian labour leader explained, ‘that these workers have to send their children to work against all the laws of humanity.’
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Before the war, the larger European plantation companies, such as Boulle’s employer, Socfin, had worked to improve workers’ health and housing. But government intervention was too weak to enforce better standards on the smaller and poorer estates. Change was often dependent on the price of rubber, and was motivated less by humanitarianism than by the desire to increase workers’ efficiency.
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As with most colonial reform, improvement and social control went hand in hand: it did not enable labourers to move freely between employers or bargain collectively. By 1947, there were planters who, as prisoners of the Japanese, had worked alongside Indian labourers on the Burma–Thailand railway and knew their needs. Jacques le Doux of Johore, who spent over forty years in Malaya, recognized that in 1942 ‘our world came to an end’. He wrote a ‘Countryman’s journal’ for the
Straits Times
which traced his deepening empathy with the labouring world that surrounded him.
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But others had difficulty coming to terms with the post-war world. ‘Where are the stiffs of yesteryear?’, lamented a columnist in the trade rag,
The Planter
. ‘The new types seemed to have lost the old joie de vivre and to have been prematurely sobered by their harrowing experiences of the last six years.’
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Many were determined to revive their former authority, and live a life that, in the words of a
Times
correspondent, resembled ‘that of an eighteenth century country gentleman enlivened by tropical variations’.
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Planters still possessed the means to keep their labour virtually isolated. Estates were private property, subject to strict trespass laws, and labourers were wholly dependent on the management for access to their homes. Any visitor had to receive the permission of the manager to enter. Planters used all available means to obstruct unwelcome guests. To trade unionists this was a denial of
a fundamental democratic right to organize: ‘an attempt’, in S. K. Chettur’s words, ‘to regiment the docile Tamil labourer in a manner that no other body of labourers on earth would dream of being subjected to’.
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It was difficult to see how the cycle of isolation and neglect could be ended. The links between the tappers and the management were the labour conductors and the estate clerks. Often of different ethnicity from the Tamil labourers – usually Malayalam-speaking southern Indians – they were both the natural leaders of these communities and potentially their worst oppressors. Their power had grown during the war in the absence of the European managers, and it was often abused. Clerks, it was said, had manipulated recruitment for the Japanese railway projects so as to send away the husbands and fathers of attractive women, leaving them prey to their attentions. Such abuses, the festering atmosphere of shame and vendetta, cast a long shadow over these small, insular communities. But to protest was to invite victimization or risk being turned off the estate.
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The only focus of community life outside this hierarchy were the small Hindu temples that labourers built for themselves. Even here, the manager often acted as patron of the temple, and his clerk and conductor would sit on its management committee. But it was to a reformed Hinduism – particularly the Dravidian movement for Tamil reawakening – that many labourers turned for an improvement of their status. Its secularized ‘reform marriage’ was, by 1947, very popular on estates. It was a simple ceremony that did not devour the resources of the poor and, presided over by Dravidian leaders or trade unionists, it provided a rare opportunity for political speeches.
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But the burning issue was the campaign against
toddy
, the wine of the palm tree and the coolie’s comfort. Planters, who often ran the estate
toddy
shops, argued that a moderate intake of
toddy
kept labourers biddable. But to reformers, it was the root of all moral and social decay.

The largest movement was led by A. M. Samy, a lorry driver on the large Harvard estate in central Kedah. On the eve of the Japanese invasion, the European manager had set up a self-defence force on the estate, and in the interregnum Samy revived it as a
thondar pedai
, or labourers’ militia. The origins of his influence are obscure. It was said that he killed a Ceylonese clerk in the war, but escaped punishment
by denouncing him as pro-British. He was certainly influenced by the INA, but was not a veteran of standing, although other leaders of the movement were. His
thondar pedai
acted as stewards at religious processions, such as the parade of penitents at Thaipusam, but then began to demonstrate in the towns against liquor and to picket
toddy
shops. When, in May 1946, the workers of Harvard estate stopped work in protest at the re-opening of the estate
toddy
shop, the
thondar pedai
enforced the strike. By now Samy possessed a rag-tag army of around 1,500 young men; they dressed in old INA forage caps and tattered khaki shorts and trained by pole-fighting in mock battles. Samy branched out to form trade unions on neighbouring estates. They dispensed a rough justice through kangaroo courts: drunks were tied to trees or made to perform physical jerks; strike-breakers were fined or beaten. The rule of the unions could be every bit as arbitrary as that of the clerks and conductors, but it broke their monopoly on power. By early 1947 around 13,000 labourers in central Kedah were under Samy’s sway, and he based his organization in the small town of Bedong, out of the reach of the trespass laws.
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On 28 February, a crowd of a thousand or so
thondar pedai
descended on Bedong, only to be confronted by the police. A labourer came forward: ‘We are not anti-government,’ he cried, ‘we are only against the drinking of
toddy
.’ He was clubbed to the ground and later died in hospital. The coroner recorded a death of ‘justifiable homicide’. A series of protest strikes erupted in the area. At Bukit Sembilan estate on 3 March trouble was triggered by the dismissal of a woman activist, and the police faced orchestrated resistance. ‘Women were to be in the forefront armed with pepper,’ it was reported; ‘Boiling water was to be kept ready; men were to be armed with sticks, stones and bottles full of sand; trees were to be cut down to make road blocks.’ Sixty-six people were arrested, and all but five of them sent to jail after a trial that lasted only a day. Fearing a rescue attempt, the police closed the hearing to the public. An investigation by the Malayan Indian Congress revealed collusion and premeditation on the part of local planters and police. S. K. Chettur claimed that women were beaten, and there were allegations that two young girls were raped in custody. Conditions at Bukit Sembilan estate were particularly dire: the only supply of water came from ravines, and labourers
shared it with their cattle; the managers had their water brought from town by lorry. The strikers’ demands focused on wages and family needs, such as crèches, better housing and equal pay for women. But the real source of anger was the summary dismissal of workers: ‘Managers feel that because we reside on the estates we are as much their property as the rubber trees.’
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As the strikes spread across central Kedah, and also to Selangor and Johore, planters were turning dissident labourers out of estates where they had lived for ten to twenty years.
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On Dublin estate in Kedah on 26 April, when 2,000 Indians laid down tools in protest at evictions following a secret union meeting at night in a shed belonging to the temple, 1,000 Chinese came out in sympathy. The police opened fire on demonstrators and one Chinese striker was killed. Even the mouthpiece of European business, the
Straits Times
, was appalled: ‘we simply cannot have the Police firing on crowds of labourers all over the country’.
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The wives of European planters fled to Penang.

It seemed that Indian and Chinese estate workers were forming a common front. They were the last major body of labourers that lay outside the communist-led Federations of Trade Unions. Its Indian leaders now came forward to help estate workers organize; many of them, including the president of the Pan-Malayan Federation of Trade Unions, S. A. Ganapathy, had both an INA and an MPAJA pedigree. Many Indian trade unions fought to stay independent, and the trade union adviser, John Brazier, sponsored rival unions, some backed by the Malayan Indian Congress, some led by estate clerks. Nevertheless, the Kedah disturbances on the estates were accompanied by a show of strength by the Federation. In Singapore, key municipal services, public transport and the port were paralysed. A strike at Batu Arang mine left power stations down to just three weeks’ supply of coal and the railways running on skeleton services. For the last time, the Japanese were brought in. But they too now worked on a go-slow. The Singapore Federation of Trade Unions mobilized the invisible city to provide strikers with food, cigarettes and strike funds.
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But if their resolve wavered, its underground Workers Protection Corps used secret-society methods to enforce discipline. When the secretary of the municipal workers’ union opened negotiations with the government, he was stabbed. The aim of the strikes, Brazier
believed, was to make the communist-backed unions the new ‘labour bosses’ of Singapore. He had all but abandoned his work on the island.
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He concluded that the niceties of English collective bargaining did not translate into a Malayan context. One problem was the penchant of local petition-writers for flowery metaphors: they spoke of ‘“baths of blood” and “seas of fire” in what should be polite letters of requests to an employer’.
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But Brazier’s insistence that the government would only recognize ‘economic’ as opposed to ‘political’ trade unions was incomprehensible to the new leaders of labour. As S. A. Ganapathy repeatedly argued: ‘The fight for a democratic constitution is a fight for better food and clothing’.
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