Om Sakthi Films - History of Plantation Tamils

Historical Root of Plantation Tamils

Tamil Coolies in Rubber Estate, 1915

Picture credit : M.S. Nakajima

Araro Ariraro is a poetic documentary that explores the chasm-like alienation of Tamil workers in Malayan plantations through their ancestral folk songs. Where colonial archives record statistics, dehumanising the workers only as labour, these Plantation Tamil folk songs resurrect them as living beings, in flesh and spirit, as artists and archivists of their own history.

This lineage of ancestral sonic culture, transcending from land to land, from ocean to ocean, from the Tamil fields to the Malayan plantations – is a memorial to the souls of the displaced Tamil proletariat.

The descendants of the Plantation Tamils have forgotten this tradition, yet with this lyrical documentary, we attempt to materialise the consciousness of the workers through the medium of the folk song, in the voices of their descendants, from the motherland and the diaspora.

Learn more about the musical documentary we're making.

Explore the history of Plantation Tamils over the centuries

Pre-3000 BC: The Ancient Tamils

A Casteless Classless Irreligious Society

🔊Listen to the folk songs of The Ancient Tamils.

Tamils are indigenous to the Tamil lands, which cover present-day Tamil Nadu, Pondicherry, and Tamil Eelam. The ancient Tamils were a casteless and classless society that lived in tribes across the five Thinais (ecologies) of Kurinji (mountains), Mullai (forests), Marutham (agricultural lands), Neithal (coastal areas), and Paalai (deserts). As independent people that ruled themselves, they revered artistic culture and social liberty, devoting their existence to all forms of art that reflected their emotional and corporeal cord to their native Thinai (ecology).

A prominent artistic community in tribal Tamil society was the Paanars, a nomadic people that roamed the lands, singing songs about the labouring masses. It is speculated that the traditions of the Paanars are the roots of the Tamil folk song practice.

Wall painting of Tamil Musicians from Brihadisvara Temple, Thanjavur

Keezhadi’s excavations prove that Tamil antiquity not only valued artistry but was also a technologically advanced society. Another excavation further confirms this by citing that the Tamil Iron Age began in 3000 BCE, possibly making it one of the oldest in the world. Yet, because the Keezhadi excavations negate the Brahminical hegemony that Hindu fascism desires to uphold, the report is being demanded to be altered to fit the vedic narrative. Counter-revolutionary politics remain as obstacles in unearthing Tamil historiography in nations like India, Sri Lanka, Singapore, and Malaysia.

When the Vendars (tribal leaders) started accumulating more wealth, wars began being fought over land, resources, and slaves. At the same time, these land-owning Vendars were enticed by migrants from the north, who later became Brahmins, to adopt their caste system and Vedic religion as a theological justification for their feudal expansion.

Tribes that were once social identity markers for the Tamils became endogamic caste identities. Land-owning Tamil feudals became powerful ‘upper caste’, while landless Tamils became ‘lower caste’ and enslaved to them.

6th Century - 13 Century

Kingdoms of the Tamil Land: Empires of Caste-Feudalism

🔊 Listen to the folk songs of The Kingdoms of Tamil Land

As caste feudalism developed, powerful kingdoms rose to rule over the ancient lands, bringing with it new advancements like towns and temples. The first of these kingdoms was the Pallava dynasty, which gained prominence in the 6th century. They were preceded by the Chozhas, the Pandyas, and the Cheras.

The most powerful of these kingdoms were the Chozhas, who possessed advanced skills in warfare and had accumulated expansive wealth through trade with empires like the Romans. They held near-monopolistic power over the Tamil oceans, allowing them to grow as a maritime empire that stretched across Southeast Asia, dominating trade and culturally influencing the region.

Tamil gardeners cultivating vegetables, 1827-35. Illustrated by M.E. Burnouf

These kingdoms were influenced by religions such as Jainism, Buddhism, Shaivism, and Vaishnavism, which all ferociously fought for power over the Tamil lands. As Brahminisms violently dominated the politics of the land, religious persecutions suppressed Jainism and Buddhism. Vaishnava and Shaiva temples, like the Chozha Empire’s Thanjai Periya Kovil, were erected as symbols of both theocratic and political power.

The tremendous economic and political power of these kingdoms was dependent on the subjugation and forced labour of the caste-oppressed Tamil peasantry. Kings and feudal lords would steal not only their labour and resources but also peasant-owned lands to give them to brahmin priests. Peasants would be bonded slaves to the temples and the lands owned by their feudal lords.

Unable to escape from their enslavement, some of these bonded slaves would even climb to the very top of these temples and fall to their deaths as a form of emancipation. There were also other peasants who waged uprisings against these tyrannical dynasties, much of which still needs to be uncovered by historians who often focus the mediaeval period on the might of kings over the militancy of peasants.

Caste-feudalism reduced the Paanars, who sang glory to labour, to being low caste, replacing their tradition with the feudal Pulavar class, whose music praised the kings and their religions. At the same time, the Sangam era did produce a complex artistic, philosophical, and spiritual culture that celebrated and criticised their era through the works of Ilango Adigal’s Silapathigaram, Thiruvalluvar’s Thirukural, and the Saiva Saint’s Thevaram.

Contemporary praxis of art too emerged with both the tradition of poetry and song being seen as one form – paadal. In Tholkappiyar’s Tholkappiyam, a study on Tamil grammaticism, details on the pann (musical tradition) of each thinai are meticulously inscribed; in the later period, these pann genres were appropriatively singularised into Carnatic music.

Outside the artisanal and intellectual class, the toiling Tamil peasants and serfs too began synthesising their folk songs, expressing their oppression and their resistance.

16th Century - 19th Century

Colonization of Tamil Nadu: Serfdom, Slavery, Prison Labour, Indentureship, and the Kangany System

🔊 Listen to the folk songs of The Colonization of Tamil Nadu.

As feudal power declined in the Tamil lands, British imperialism developed, overpowering other European imperialist nations in seizing power. In 1639, the British East India Company established its first trading post in Madras, solidifying their economic and military dictatorship over the Tamil lands.

In 1801, the British annexed the last independent Tamil kingdom, bringing Tamil Nadu under the Madras Presidency and eventually integrating the Tamil lands and other regions of the subcontinent into a singular colony for imperial convenience. As the feudal lords acted as a comprador class to the colonial powers, the labour of the Tamil peasantry was industrialised for the advance of imperialism.

Since the 17th century, the Port of Madras has been a well-known slave trading coast, where European imperialists have been trafficking Tamil slaves to places like Malacca, Jawa, the Philippines, and the Netherlands. There were also many Tamil prison labourers that were brought to these very same regions to work for imperial companies.

Indentured Indian workers aboard a sailing vessel in the 1830s.
Illustrated by Raouf Oderuth

Although the British had officially abolished slavery in India, the feudal lords still held power over the caste-oppressed peasantry, keeping them as bonded labour. Land reforms to the feudal Rwotwari and Mirasi systems lead the way for the Tamil serfs to transition from their feudal bondage to being exploited as a proletariat labour supply for European imperialism. This transition catalysed the forced labour migration of the Tamil proletariat to places like Mumbai’s Dharavi, Karnataka’s Kolar Gold Fields, and Kerala’s and Ceylon’s plantations.

In 1834, a year after the British abolished slavery in its colonies, the indenture system was introduced. Indian indentured workers were vital to the British, who had to replace the former enslaved African labour in their colonies. Beginning in the 1840s, hundreds and thousands of the former caste-oppressed Tamil peasants were trafficked to British (and French) colonies across the world.

The Tamils, who were landless, poor, and starved by the imperialist-created famines, were displaced from their motherland to faraway regions like Southeast Asia, South Africa, and the Caribbean. Although indentureship was a contract that would last for 3-5 years, some workers were manipulated into staying longer, sometimes spending their entire lives in colonial plantations, never returning to their motherland.

Some had even died on the voyage itself. Between 1886 and 1957 approximately 750,000 Tamils died from their journey to Malaya. In the 1920s, the indentured system was replaced by the kangany system, which had Tamils being middlemen in recruiting workers from their own castes and villages.

In these voyages to these strange lands, in working in the early industries of Madras, and in their brutal starvation during the Madras Famines, the Tamil workers documented each of their harrowing histories through the medium of the Tamil folk song. They expressed their unflinching anger towards colonialism, their displacement, and their powerless alienation throughout it all.

1840s-1940s

Tamils in British Malaya: Coolies as Revolutionaries

Indian men on a rubber plantation Year/Period Early 20th century.
Photo Credit : National Museum of Singapore

🔊 Listen to the folk songs of British Malayan Tamils.

When the Tamil workers arrived at the Malayan ports, they were quarantined for diseases, and once cleared they were immediately transported to the rubber plantations, isolated and alienated from the rest of Malayan land and people. Along with the rubber industry, the colonial Malayan economy was also dependent on the tin industry, which operated through the exploitation of Chinese workers.

While the Tamil and Chinese proletariats worked in imperialist industries, segregated from one another, much of the native Malay peasantry was still trapped in the Malay feudal system, toiling as farmers and fisherfolk while the Orang Asli (indigenous people) lived in the forests. The Tamil and Chinese bourgeois had white-collar jobs in the towns and they were subservient to imperialism while the Malay aristocracy was compradors to the colonial regime.

Even though the Tamil bourgeois held disdain for the Tamil proletariat, the former, especially the Tamil Muslim bourgeois, championed the Tamil language, pioneering Tamil print publications in Malaya. The Tamil newspaper was a crucial modern invention that communicated ideologies and movements from the Motherland to the Malayan Tamil diaspora.

Among them were, Ko. Sarangapany’s Dravidian Munnetram, Narasimha Iyengar’s Indian nationalist Tamil Nesan, and the Communist Party of India’s political organ, Janasakthi. The Malayan Tamils workers even had their own press called Pattali Murasu.

Ko. Sarangapany, Editor of Tamil Murasu’ received Periyar during his visit to Singapore in 1955.
Picture credit : The Modern Rationalist.

Tamil labour was used to clear the forests for plantations, and outside of estates, Tamils were employed to lay railway tracks, build roads, work on docks, and other labour-intensive sectors. As plantation workers, they were bound to the estates, and their movement was highly policed by the colonial management.

Although Malaya rose to be one of the most prominent rubber manufacturing colonies internationally, the Tamil rubber plantation workers still received incredibly low wages that further trapped them in debt. The living conditions of the workers were also cramped, unhygienic, and inhumane. The workers were also brutalized by the plantation management, women workers in particular were vulnerable to sexual abuse.

This violent suppression of the Tamil workers catalysed their class consciousness, workers began organizing strikes, forming labour unions, and being influenced by communism. The Klang Strikes of 1941, led by the Tamil plantation workers, is still known today as one of the most powerful labour uprisings to have taken place in colonial Malaya. The 1940s was when Tamil workers like S. A. Ganapathy and P. Veerasenan rose to lead the Pan-Malayan Federation of Trade Unions. S. A. Ganapathy was also part of the Indian National Army (INA) which had recruited many Malayan Tamils in its Indian liberation movement.

The INA was also responsible for sending hundreds and thousands of Tamils to work as slave labour for the Death Railway where many perished and only a few survived. Malayan Tamils were instrumental in the Indian Independence movement but many Tamils, including S. A. Ganapathy, abandoned the INA because they had endured anti-Tamil abuse from their north Indian compatriots.

The Tamils chose instead to join the Malayan Peoples’s Anti-Japanese Army. Revolutionary Tamils were monumental in the anti-imperialist movement, contributing their lives towards the emancipation of Malaya and Singapore from both Japanese and British occupation and also towards the liberation of their Tamil motherland.

The folk songs sung during this period etched deeply the dehumanisation they faced on the plantation through the hands of British colonialism, the horrors they endured during the Japanese occupation and their complex emotions throughout this violent history.

Tamil Coolie from Malaya, 1949. Illustrated by Abbott Harold in Siam (Thailand) during Japanese Occupation

Apart from Indian and Malayan national liberation, and the global communist movement, Tamil workers were also dedicated to Periyar’s Dravidian movement. In the 1930s, Ko. Sarangapany’s Tamil Reform Association would organize Dravidian programmes that would propagate the rationalist and anti-caste philosophy of Periyar.

This social movement caused many Tamils in the estates to be greatly inspired to conduct self-respectful marriages, fight against casteism in the plantation and celebrate the first month of Thai as Tamizhar Thirunaal (Tamil New Year).

As a product of Dravidian politics, Dravidian cinema too greatly moved the plantation Tamils. MGR’s worker-centric films, and particularly the motivational songs that featured him, significantly uplifted workers morale, even going as far as influencing their political leanings.

1950s-2020s

Neocolonial Malaysia: Death of Plantation Tamil Labour

🔊 Listen to the folk songs of Neocolonial Malaysian Tamils.

In 1957, the decline of direct British colonial rule ushered in Tunku Abdul Rahman’s imperialist comprador administration that imposed the process of Malayanisation throughout the neocolony. Plantation capital that was previously owned by European colonists was bought over by Malaysian capitalists, catalysing the fragmentation of estates and signalling the first wave of displacement of plantation workers in Malaysia.

The process of neocolonisation also deported hundreds and thousands of plantation Tamils that did not have citizenship back to Tamil Nadu. To counter the destruction of the estates and their livelihood, Tamil workers continuously organised strikes. In 1968 alone, 90 strikes took place all over Malaysian rubber plantations against these drastic changes.

Throughout Razak’s capitalist expansion in the 1970s and Mahathir’s neoliberal industrialisation of the 1980s-2000s, the destruction of the rubber plantations and the displacement of Tamil plantation workers accelerated. As Bangladeshi and Indonesian migrant workers were cheaper alternative plantation labour, Malaysian Tamil workers were displaced to being urban proletarians. In the estates, Tamils ferociously struggled for alternative housing; some of these struggles have led to them gaining alternative housing, while others still continue to fight, and many more remain landless.

Protest for promised housing by Prang Besar Estate ex-labourers, 2013. Picture credit : JERIT

In the neocolony, the Malaysian Tamil proletariat are systematically discriminated against in employment, education, and housing, trapping many in a vicious cycle of poverty. However, some plantation Tamils were able to transform themselves into the middle class, assimilating into Malaysia’s neocolonial multiculturalism.

As the Malaysian economy destroyed the plantations, Malaysian politics diluted traces of the Tamil proletariat from school curriculum, national museums, and radical scholarship. The existence of the Tamil proletariat is eclipsed by the neocolonial nation.

Displaced from the plantation, the neocolony and their motherland, the art of the folk song too has been ruptured from the Malaysian Tamils. Yet, remnants of ancestral aesthetics persist through their experimental cinema, their artwork, their rap songs and in the very vernacular they speak.

Tamil proletarian history lives on through her descendants, not as relics, but as reality. As guidance in their struggle for emancipation.

Written and researched by Miriyam Ilavenil
Miriyam Ilavenil is a journalist, editor, translator and independent researcher whose work
centers on proletarian historiography, neocolonialisms, and Southeast Asian politics.

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