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In the estate, Thangamaal, despite not knowing how to read or write, raised her son, Neelavanan, with stories from the Mahabaratham, Ramayanam, as well as Tamil Bhakti songs. In spite of her devotion towards Hinduism, she was a woman who liked eating beef, a meat often seen as ‘impure’ by caste-Hindus.

“Once, my mother bought beef from the town, and when the neighbours asked her what she was cooking, she said mutton. When I asked my akka (sister) why amma (mother) said that, she told me that people [Hindus] who pray can’t eat beef,” recalled Neelavanan.

As Neelavanan grew up, he understood that Hindu religiosity surrounding beef was a weapon against Dalits who consume it. “People around me eat mutton, chicken, water monitors, pork—they eat everything,” he said. “But when it comes to beef, they say that it is god. They brand [Hindus] who eat beef as coming from a certain caste. We are buying [beef] with our own money; we did not steal or beg for it. Yes, I eat beef, so what?”

Ove time, however, the culture of eating beef has deliberately declined among Dalits in Malaysia as a way to escape casteism and adapt to caste-Hindu practices. This shift can be seen in Neelavanan’s own family, where his siblings and relatives refuse to eat beef and even scrutinise him for his beef-eating habits.

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Please Share Or Replog Or Donate For My Family 🙏

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As of now only €5,617 out of their €50,000 goal has been raised. If you cannot donate, please atleast share the donation link!

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“Filmmaking is now a dangerous vocation in Malaysia and far from the internationally competitive industry the Prime Minister imagines,” the organization said this week in an open letter. “With the new LPF guidelines we could potentially see an increase in arrests and investigations.”

Government is proposing to expand the scope of the LPF and to give national guidelines a more pro-Islamic stance.

Section 2.1.1 of the new LPF religious guidelines mean that films touching on “teaching that promotes anti-God [beliefs], atheism, agnosticism, scientology, religious pluralism, liberalism, blasphemy, supporting fanatical beliefs, criticising, denouncing or discrediting any religion” will be subject to more scrutiny.

— Malaysian Filmmakers, Academics Slam Expanded Censorship Rules: ‘Filmmaking is Now a Dangerous Vocation’

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Indian tea production has been in severe crisis since the mid nineties largely due to neo-liberal structural adjustments in the Indian economy. The size of the tea industry, which is second only to China and accounts for 25 percent of global tea production, has made this a huge blow to the country’s agrarian economy. The industry employs 1.26 million people on tea plantations and two million additional people indirectly. As such, the economic crisis has had an enormous impact on the lives of local residents. In Kerala where I have been conducting research, there have been eight cases of suicide and twelve deaths due to starvation on tea plantations since 2001. Along with utter poverty and famine, tea plantation workers have faced increasingly unhygienic work environments, shattered social life/community relations, and withdrawal of the welfare measures previously enjoyed. The crisis punctured the isolated environments of the plantations and precipitated neoliberal reforms that closed down production in many areas either partially or completely. While many families remained on the plantations, large numbers of workers who had lived there for more than five generations were now compelled to seek work outside. Some went with their families to either their ancestral villages or regional industrial townships such as Coimbatore and Tirupur in Tamil Nadu. These plantation workers have now joined the ranks of the massive Dalit workforce powering India’s unorganised and informal sectors. In joining that pool of workers, Tamil Dalit labourers are exposed to aspects of a caste-ridden society from which they had previously been shielded. The situation of Saraswathi, a female retired worker in her early sixties, illustrates the dilemma and struggles of the workers who moved out the plantations.

— The hidden injuries of caste: south Indian tea workers and economic crisis by Jayaseelan Raj

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Kerala has been widely lauded for having achieved human development goals comparable to those of economically advanced countries despite being economically poor. Its allegedly egalitarian economic model was highlighted as an alternative to neoliberal, free market policies. However, the ‘pro-poor’ policies largely passed over the plantations. Plantation workers have not benefited from the land reforms of the 1960s and 1970s, and thus the majority have remained poor, landless labourers working within the exploitative plantation system. Moreover, the women plantation workers face multiple levels of discrimination because they are, at the same time, Tamil, Dalit, and female. Remarkably, though, the Pembillai Orumai challenged the negative caste prejudice and ethnic stereotyping of the plantation Tamils. The ethnic stereotyping of lower class Dalit Tamils is epitomised by the slur ‘pandi’, which symbolises the inferior in the oppositions of modern/non-modern, and resourceful/unresourceful. The portrayal of the Tamil plantation women as unresourceful was evident in the racist colonial conception of Tamil plantation workers as hard working but unintelligent. Echoes of this imagery were everywhere during the Pembillai Orumai strike. Many commentators, including trade union leaders, framed the strike as an anarchist act that could not be considered a proper form of resistance. They also repeatedly claimed that ‘invisible forces’ instigated the strike, an accusation the leaders of Pembillai Orumai strongly denied. These accusations were meant to rob the underclass—lower caste—Tamil speaking women of their due credit by suggesting they were incapable of organising themselves. Yet it was this very community who designed and implemented a model of resistance that interrogated the contradictions of the widely celebrated Kerala development model and its egalitarian claims. And as all actions, this one had its own momentum. It also became an act of rebellion that challenged the social relations responsible for their alienated condition, including the ethnic stereotypes that characterised them as inferior. It was an attempt to reclaim human personality in a Dalit liberation tradition, not only for them but also for their men and their dead indentured ancestors.

— The women strike back: the protest of Pembillai Orumai tea workers by Jayaseelan Raj

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The story, which was developed by both Eve and Gogu since October 2023, is partly rooted in the childhood of Eve, a Mindanao native who had grown up with the violence of the Marawi conflict. As the daughter of a Filipino army man, Eve had been exposed to the conflict from a different perspective. Although she too grew up with the intimate and brutal reality of violence, her circumstances did not allow her to view the occupation from the perspective of the oppressed Muslims. Her reality was one that shielded her from understanding the conflict more complexly; thus, in her childhood, she viewed Muslims as aggressors without realising what prompted them to initiate the struggle for an independent state. Through visualising the displacement of the Maranao Muslims in Walay Balay, Eve expresses the inter-connectivity between their alienation to the larger alienation of the many peoples of the Philippines, who have been uprooted from their indigenous consciousness by the violence of colonialism.

“It is clear and important to me to see the story of the Muslim refugees because the Philippines was not a Christian country before the Spanish colonisation. Our ancestors were forced to convert to Christianity so they cannot be seen as enemies of the colonisers. Our ancestors who once owned the land and their identity eventually became lost in their own land stripped away of their own name. In a way, this is my way of telling that tragic, part of our history through our characters who lost their home and are in  search of their identities.” – Eve Baswel

The siege of Marawi, one of the oldest Islamic cities in Mindanao, happened in 2017 when ISIS collapsed the local government, occupied the city, and was warring against the Filipino government for nearly 5 months. Due to the violent conflict, many of the city’s residents had to evacuate, displacing nearly 300,000 people from their ancestral soil. Even after the reclamation of Marawi by the government, the Maranao Muslim refugees who had returned to their native land had been met with many bureaucratic difficulties. Till today, nearly 7 years after the conflict, many Maranao Muslims have not been properly relocated by the government. Due to the strong anti-colonial history that the Mindanao region has in fighting against the imperial subjugations of the Spanish, the Maranao people also refuse to bow to the hegemonic reign of the Catholic-dominated Filipino government, which is aggressively trying to centralise the Filipino landscape against the will of the masses. A way in which the government tries to claim power over the land is by demanding registered land permits from the residents of Marawi, who, in defiance of this neocolonial bureaucracy, refuse to abide by the self-made rules that the puppet government imposes on their rightful native land, a revolutionary spirit they have critically carried on since struggling against the violence of Spanish and American colonialism.

“Displacement is not new to us,” says Gogu, referring to how, as a descant of indentured Tamils who at first faced uprooting from their ancestral land in Tamil Nadu, and once again during the aftermath of colonialism, from the plantations, he too can understand the struggles of displacement, but he states that to him, the uprooting that Maranao Muslims have faced is far worse than the displacement of Plantation Tamils, for the Maranao Muslims had been made landless in their own land while the Plantation Tamils had been made landless on alien soil.

— Gogularaajan Rajendran on Co-directing Walay Balay, Filipino Cinema, and His Cannes Debut

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The people who are coming to Auroville are often coming from the places that were settler colonies. A lot of Australians, people from North America. Even if they weren’t colonial citizens. The Mother is, on the face of it, anti-colonial. But she practised these settler colonial activities, under the guise of spiritual enlightenment. And this is nothing new. This is the story of the French Republic, particularly If you look at histories of Haiti, for example. I haven’t looked at spiritual settlements in other parts of India, but I’m sure there are similarities there, where you have wandering Westerners who have been completely immersed in these orientalist fantasies of the spiritual lives in India. Spiritual utopianism and settler utopianism, the terms are meant to ask people to think about how someone who has a utopian vision is dispossessing and displacing indigenous people at the same time. To this very day Auroville’s promotional material are full of words like “frontier” and “pioneer”, all of these things that come straight from the United States experience of settlement. And it’s glorified, as if you’re doing it for the greater good.

— Jessica Namakkal on what Auroville tells us about the ‘end of colonialism and empire’

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The Manjolai tea estate, once under the control of the Singambatti Zamin before independence, was leased to The Bombay Burma Trading Corporation in 1929 for 99 years. Despite numerous changes in government administration, this lease prevented the forest department from taking control of the dense forest area of Manjolai.

With the lease set to expire in 2028, the forest department is now making efforts to bring Manjolai, Nalumku, and Kakachi under its jurisdiction. As part of this process, the government has begun taking steps to evict the workers, even though the lease period still has four years remaining. The urgency from the government stems from the logistical challenges of managing and transporting the produce from the tea estates, which could take several months. Consequently, the livelihoods of the workers who have lived and worked there for more than 90 years are now in jeopardy, leaving them deeply concerned about their future.

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“After 1947, you had even [“Mahatma” Mohandas] Gandhi saying to these people [in Pondicherry], “Hold on, don’t do anything, just respect the French right now.” And you have France on the other side saying the same thing. You have these people who aren’t really being listened to by either state. And the British found this place to be a horrible backwater, that was just a headache to them.

The people of Pondicherry are not stateless. They are within state territories. But they basically have no agency. None of the people in power is listening to them. So what does it mean to look at this minor space that has been dismissed, even when you have this intense division of territory that truly affects people’s lives?”

— Jessica Namakkal on what Auroville tells us about the ‘end of colonialism and empire’

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In 1998, the government relocated my longhouse—along with many others—to Sungai Asap because they wanted that land for the Bakun Dam. I was seven years old at the time, and my memory of the event is hazy at best. They say the relocation was voluntary but we all know what “voluntary” means in this country. The Bakun Dam is 205 meters tall and has a surface area of 695 square kilometres. For contrast, Singapore is 728 square kilometers. Yes, all of Singapore.

Last year, I discovered a two-hour-long, twenty-year-old video of my old longhouse. It was like looking at a ghost, like seeing a place from a dream you had a long time ago. It was posted on my cousin’s Facebook page and, as it turns out, was filmed by my father. I was shocked, but at the same time, not shocked at all. He never offers up information unless explicitly asked, and I don’t know if that’s a cultural thing, or a generational thing. Perhaps, as is often the case, it’s a little bit of both. My father was documenting the days leading up to our exodus. He was walking up and down my old longhouse’s wooden verandah, recording the old doors, the old walls, the old land, the old river, the old trees, because that would be the last time any of us would ever see them.

In one scene, a pui ake’ (grandfather) was performing a ritual. He was saying goodbye to the land. The video was pixelated and the audio was muffled, but I heard him saying, “We are leaving this place…” and someone from off-screen interjected, yelling: “We’re not leaving, we are running away! We are running away.”

It must have been one of my uncles, but I couldn’t recognize his voice, twisted by pain and anger and defeat. The same pain and anger and defeat that has haunted me since I was old enough to understand how things are done in Malaysia.

Decades later, my father, along with quite a few of my relatives, returned to Bakun and built floating houses, homestays, and lodges. I guess we got tired of running away.

— Above a Drowned World, Existence is Resistance By Bethany Luhong Balan

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“Was drowning my ancestral home worth it? Was it worth uprooting us and short-changing us on what we were promised? Was it worth an entire generation of Kayan youths having to cosplay as archaeologists just to keep our heritage alive? The answer depends on who you ask, I guess. But Kayan people are nothing if not resilient. “We’re still here” should be our community motto. Despite being uprooted, colonized, converted, and Bangsa Malaysia-nized, we are still here.”

— Above a Drowned World, Existence is Resistance by Bethany Luhong Balan

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Apart from the telephone, even letters were a popular means of staying connected. Being more personal, affordable, and accessible, they allowed one to express wholeheartedly, especially the new brides. At home, Amma would pack some khasta and bhunja (our native snacks) and stitch them all together in a piece of cloth with our letters. I remember, Papa once replied, “Jab bhi Nehal ka khat aata hai, main kayi maah tak usko padhta hoon.” (Whenever Nehal’s letter arrives, I read it for several months.) Only later, did I truly acknowledge his emotions and my naivety as a child who didn’t understand then that ‘maah’ meant month. 

Later, even recorded audio tapes were used by migrants to exchange messages but my family did not engage in this practice as it was mostly used by newly married couples; it was not widely respected among elders. Then, the coin-calling system emerged, with a coin offering a minute of conversation. Another method was operator-calling, often considered illegal, but still used frequently as it allowed migrants to talk for a longer duration at any desired time, marking the beginning of uninterrupted communication among migrant families. The advent of mobile phones in the subsequent years further allowed for more private conversations and individual autonomy. Initially, only migrants used them but later even their families joined in and the significance of landline phones gradually declined. Initially, without the Internet, there were options like calling cards. Papa would often caution us to talk for five minutes only when calling on someone else’s mobile, as he had bought a five-minute calling card.

In 2014 and 2015, Papa and Abbu returned from the Gulf respectively. They were among the first batch to leave, and now the third generation is working there. Besides WhatsApp, other apps like I.M.O. and Skype have also grown popular due to the easy accessibility of smartphones and the Internet. However, amidst this rapidly changing world, my most significant memory of Papa’s life abroad is still the installation of the landline telephone in our home—how I would inform all the migrants to dial our phone number instead of calling in another mohalla. I would proudly declare in one go, “Ab humaare ghar phone lag gaya hai aur humaara number 25240 hai; 06154 laga lena pehle.” (Now we have a telephone at our home and our number is 25240; please add 06154 as a prefix.) 

As happy as I have been, to be able to hold on to these bittersweet childhood memories, I cannot deny the fact that my father’s migration deprived me of a normal childhood and experiences that would have been possible in his presence. A sense of detachment and an agonizing silence lurk between us—a void that seems only to be deepening in this digital age, reminding me that I am not merely a participant of migration but also a victim of migration.

— Gulf Calling by Nehal Ahmed

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For a prolonged time, Gulf migrants and their families (often colloquially addressed as ‘Arbian’), like many others from this region, have lacked the basic resources, time, and literacy needed for self-expression, rendering countless histories undocumented. In recent years, I’ve grown concerned about how socio-economic and administrative facets commonly receive attention, but there is an absence of interest in the social, psychological, cultural, and other everyday nuances of the migrants’ lives from our region, particularly female autonomy and intergenerational memories.

In my family, until now, six male members have worked in Gulf countries and two of them have returned after retirement. After pursuing class 10th, my father, Md Majaz*, and his friend, Firaq Uncle* quit their studies and started working at different construction sites in India. Their tryst with the Gulf began in the 1970s when someone helped them acquire passports and suggested they go to Delhi to meet an agent who could help them secure jobs. They travelled to Delhi for the first time by train and bus, and also walked for around 100 kilometres as they were unfamiliar with the local transport. 

In Delhi, they stayed with a driver (a close confidante from home) in a slum, who also helped them collect visas from the agent. Interestingly, Firaq Uncle (whom I call Abbu) recalls that it was the same day when an American spaceship had met with an accident, delaying their flight to Bombay. Uncertain of the imminent life in a foreign land then, they conceded to the agent’s terms and conditions, feeling relieved that they would finally earn good money and escape poverty. In the 2000s, at least one male member from each family in our village lived in an Arab country, typically for two years at a stretch and returning thereafter for a two-month vacation during which he spent time with his family, got married, met relatives, and attended to mundane obligations, leaving little room for conjugal privacy and other familial aspirations. 

— Gulf Calling by Nehal Ahmed

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Torsten Tschacher on the history of Tamil Muslims and Tamil Print Publications in Colonial Penang

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Sun-J: It all started in the 1980s in the television industry. Many of the filmmakers who are now freelancing started their careers in the television industry. Back then, to become a filmmaker, you had to be dependent on a TV station, and I too was part of a production house. I decided to work in the television industry, making dramas and other productions to learn more about the industry. I had the option of working in the Malay film industry or becoming a journalist, however, I wanted to make my own Tamil films with an independent spirit, so I started my own production house in 2011.

From the 1990s to the early 2000s, the Malaysian Indian film industry was controlled by a small group of people. Without them, it was difficult to break into the industry, but suddenly around 2006, the industry opened up and anyone could become a filmmaker. So I was in a generation in-between.

With the spread of digital cameras, Final Cut Pro (video editing software for professionals) became widely used around 2006, and with the expansion of social media, it became possible for people to produce and post their own videos. “Fire on Water” is set around 2004 to early 2010, so it depicts the analog and digital eras, separated by around the year 2006. 

Another turning point in the Malaysian Indian film industry was the inclusion of non-Malay films, such as Tamil and Chinese, in the “Skim Wajib Tayang” (Compulsory Screening Scheme), which was previously only for Malay-language films, enabling Tamil-language films to be screened in major cinemas in the country since 2012. And in recent years, social media has become the new platform for people. TikTok, in particular, has seen some influencers earning significant income.

— “Fire on Water”, Unraveling Malaysia's Indian Community through the Tamil Film