The Law’s Betrayal

This chapter focuses on the professionals of the Tamil population. A cultural displacement, as experienced by the Indian middle class, has produced its own narrative that was subsequently hijacked by Malay “extremists.” This sense of betrayal among the Indian middle class is important because their narrative of victimization takes cohesive ideological shape in a form that disseminates to the working class through the work of activists, politicians, writers, NGOs, and lawyers. Through this, one sees an important class dialectic within the Indian community that is divisive, as well as signs that recent legal decisions and events have exacerbated a sense of insecurity. Ultimately, a deep sense of political betrayal within this elite class is producing nostalgia for a nonracialized Malaysia on the one hand, and a consolidation of Indianness on the other.

An Emergent Betrayal

This chapter analyzes the transformation of the plantation industry in Malaysia's commercial heartland, primarily in the state of Selangor, to understand how the bureaucratization of ethnic entitlement affected the politics of development—which in turn had economic and symbolic consequences for Tamil communities experiencing displacement. Development politics have brought about a dramatic demographic shift in the ethnic composition of Malaysia's industrial heartland. This was the intended goal all along. To develop the nation's core identity, politically constructed around Malay ethnicity and Islam, the two being increasingly synonymous, it was argued that Malays had to be united and strong—particularly at the center. In addition to reforming and thereby policing Malay identity, incentives and privileges created a culture of privilege and increasing self-rationalization of these purported entitlements.

Ethnic Riots and Other Myths

This chapter examines what was described as the worst “ethnic rioting” in Malaysia in decades. In 2001, Malays and Indians clashed in an area known as Kampung Medan. Many analysts, academics, and politicians were quick to ascribe blame, drawing on the ethnic “myths” or stereotypes. Others invoked the purported and inevitable frustrations caused by anomie and squalor in squatter areas. The recounting of the violent events by witnesses and victims demonstrates that the respective figures of the Indian and Malay increasingly silence complex exchanges and intimacies between the two groups. These figures, in turn, are also produced out of a particular developmentalism driven by ethnonationalist impulses. The chapter also studies the symptoms of cultural and ethnic uncertainty generated by the bureaucratization of ethnic privilege.

The Locus of God’s Power

This chapter explores the conundrum whereby the abyss of symbolic rupture oscillates with the reconstitution of recognizable forms of power and immanence, and hence agency and intentionality. As described in the last chapter, the fire and demolitions of the Ebor Estate temples caused shock and disbelief among the devotees of that community. The shards of disbelief were also the propellants of renewed faith, however, and they revitalized and politicized efforts toward a reconstitution of sacred ground. On the one hand, the faith in the system and in intercommunal relations more broadly was erased overnight by the acts of vandalism and demolition, but on the other hand, and equally important, the challenge to faith that ensued when a sacred site was desecrated cannot be overestimated. Though devotees would not consciously acknowledge this, the temple's immanence and purity, its very power, was called into question when it had been defiled and damaged.

Hindraf and the Haunting of Justice

This concluding chapter describes the remarkable events that marked the Hindraf (Hindu Rights Action Force) protests in 2007. It also makes three broad claims about the Indian uprising that simultaneously sum up arguments made throughout the book. First, the Indian uprising—particularly as culminating in the Hindraf movement—gained resonance as an awakening to the Law's capriciousness. Second, the transgression of the letter of the Law became a means toward realizing a distinction between legality and justice. Third, an emergent sense of historicity among Tamils arose that articulated frustrations over increasing Islamization and the perceived de-Indianization of Malay culture. Ultimately, the chapter argues that the capricious force of law and the violence of “order” was haunted by what it suppressed. Moreover, in Tamil Hinduism, notions of divine justice became fused with sometimes violent imaginaries of divine vengeance, which in turn are also haunting in their possessive force.

Interruptions, Insurrections, Strategies

This chapter assesses the strategies of resistance of Tamils, assessing their aims and effectiveness given recent successes and failures. It describes how an indescribable shock and disbelief in the aftermath of temple demolitions by developers had generated strategies of social mobilization. Ironically, destructions renewed faith and revitalized efforts to reconstitute sacred ground. At the same time, these efforts are increasingly grounded in a victim's narrative as the ultimate cause of spiritual desecration by developers, town councils, and the racialized state. The chapter then suggests that success and failure is hard to measure in material terms alone. Indeed, themes of betrayal, redemption, and ultimately justice takes one to the heart of Tamil notions of the divine, beyond juridical or economic calculation.

Introduction

This introductory chapter provides a background of the struggles faced by plantation workers in Malaysia, considering the frustrations and fears that descended upon the Tamil population as a result of a particular kind of developmentalism. The plantation industry, formerly the primary employer of Tamils in Malaysia, has restructured in ways that have negatively impacted the Tamil communities. Tamil laborers, and the entire communities they belonged to, were retrenched and displaced as plantations were either converted into more lucrative land developments or increasingly mechanized. Indeed, foreign workers from Indonesia and Bangladesh have been brought in to replace Tamil workers to cut labor costs. Ultimately, it is in the combination of demographic transformations and the political and economic marginalization of Tamils that accompanied them, coupled with the apparently amnesiac hostility with which Malays in the newly created townships show to older Hindu presences there, that draws the ire of the Tamil community.

Flats

This chapter explores how former plantation residents have adjusted to life in low-cost flats as part of a government-sponsored relocation scheme. The creation of Putrajaya, the government's new administrative and symbolic capital, was built directly on former plantation lands; the residents were relocated to a housing project in nearby Dengkil. Through interviews with residents in the flats, a sense of discontent and awareness of a state “betrayal” is made palpable. The chapter also looks at the story of a “miraculous mango tree” still standing in Putrajaya—as well as a relocated shrine associated with that tree—now located in a flat. This reconstituted shrine, in the context of an inauspicious flat, provokes both the beauty of hope and the horror of the sublime to Tamils who gaze upon it.

Tapping Memories

This chapter focuses on a growing sense of victimization among Tamils. It addresses how a sense of community, nostalgically formed in the shadow of the Other and framed in the terms of victimhood, seeks to reconstitute itself through a struggle for compensation. Methods of civil disobedience, aided by NGO activists and legal counsel, are witnessed in some cases. However, given the choice of employment elsewhere, cash, and/or the preservation of “community” through collective relocation, groups and individuals will be seen to often act against utilitarian interests. The chapter then looks at the case of a Tamil “mystic” in a plantation, seeing through his story of spiritual transcendence the gradual interpolation of ethnic politics into the lives of plantation workers, as well as the important role that religion plays in mediating politics.

Plantation Fragments

This chapter looks at a series of ethnographic encounters in several plantation communities within Selangor, the “ground zero” of plantation retrenchment and evictions. It considers the communities and individuals who express a sense of anxiety and despair as their neighborhoods are threatened by demolition. At the same time, the sense of the plantation as a site of nostalgia and positive identification is seen to be growing in the specter of its demise. In this context, the importance of documentation and an emergent historicity is described as important to plantation dwellers as a political resource, as well as an archive of victimhood. The chapter then describes the increasing resonance and justice-seeking fervor surrounding a Tamil-Hindu festival celebration in a plantation slated for retrenchment and eviction.