Forgotten Wars by Tim Harper & Tim Harper

Author:Tim Harper & Tim Harper
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2007-03-25T16:00:00+00:00

MALAYA’S FORGOTTEN REGIMENTS

Among the forsaken of empire were the vast regiments of labourers on the rubber plantations of Malaya. In the words of Selangor trade unionist C. V. S. Krishnamoorthi:

Ours is a life of meek suffering toiling from the sunrise to sunset like an automaton day in and day out leading a life squalid, poverty-stricken, starving, without education, joy or any ray of hope to better ourselves and those who you consider as our dependants for whose advancement in life we are bound to God. What to do? We toil draining our life blood to produce that alluring commodity LATEX Rubber for the whole world and for the enhancement of our country’s wealth, suffering mosquito and leech bites, withered by malaria, and our bones and skinny skeletons shivering in cold lack of clothing and nourishing food we lead on this existence.23

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.24

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

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